THEY EVENTUALLY FOUND THE BOARDWALK COINSPINNER HAD MENTIONED, as soon as they found the houses on stilts. All of them except Javier stared at the weird buildings, puzzled, until Javier sighed and explained, "The storms, okay? They're on stilts to keep them out of the water whenever there's a storm."
"But what if the wind just knocks 'em down?" Yoopy wondered.
Javier rolled his eyes. "Then they're shit out of luck, aren't they?"
Yoopy looked at him. "Well, you don't have to get mean."
They had driven to this part of the island and now parked along the road. Damien just kept thinking of Mackinac Island, except Mackinac didn't allow cars, and they sold more fudge there. That was why it always smelled like fudge and horse droppings. When Yoopy admitted he rather liked the unusual smell Damien dropped it and let him talk about it to himself.
"It smells all salty here," Yoopy said. He took a deep breath. "Wow! I just can't get used to all this water."
"There's so many stores," D. J. said. "How do we know which one?"
"He said this Catera guy is a baba--baba--" Damien trailed off uncertainly. "Baba-something."
"Babalawo," Javier said. They looked at him and he shrugged. "Santería is pretty native to Latin America. It's kind of like voodoo with the Haitians. A folk religion."
"What is it, exactly?" Damien prodded, not quite sure he liked the sound of this.
Javier sighed again. "I'm not a practicing santero, remember? I just know what I've read about. But it's pretty native to Cuba especially, like palo mayombe. And voodoo with Haiti. And brujería with Mexico."
"So what's the dif?" Damien still wasn't getting it.
Javier must have been thinking he was pretty dumb, with the way he rolled his eyes again. "Well, for one thing, voodoo and santería are from the Yoruba juju religion in Africa, brujería is from the Aztecs, and palo mayombe is from the Bantu tribe. But people like you keep mixing them up."
"Are they anything we should worry about, I mean?"
"Worry? Probably not. There's so many santeros practicing in Miami alone, and the worst thing I believe they've gotten is dead animals."
Damien grimaced. "Well, that's something to look out for. Coinspinner said he ran a shop. What should we look for there?"
"If he's a babalawo, he's probably running some kind of botánica. You know; where they sell roots and herbs and sacrificial animals or stuff like that. Like I said, I'm not practicing it. I'm a Catholic."
Damien nodded. "Sounds easy enough to spot. We can check there first."
They walked down across the sand towards the boardwalk and its shops. The whole thing was supported on those flimsy-looking stilts, spanning out far over the water. Yoopy, D. J., and Damien still found it hard to believe such a thing would be able to sustain high winds, even if it managed to last through a flood, when it was winds you had to look out for. Being from Tornado Alley even the Texans should know what they knew.
They tromped up a set of steps and started down the dock, their sandals clopping along the worn wood. There were other people here, milling in and out of shops and talking and taking pictures. Damien hadn't brought a camera, and he was glad. That would have been way too touristy. He could sense Yoopy's urge to take pictures even without a camera himself, and held out a hand. "Down, boy. Don't send out too many tourist pheromones."
"Phero-what?" Yoopy echoed.
"What's a botánica look like?" D. J. asked.
"How the hell would I know!" Javier snapped back.
"Seems it would have roots and shrunken heads and things hanging in front," Yoopy suggested.
This time they all made a face.
"You've been reading far too many books, Yoop," Damien said.
For a while they just walked along, pausing once in a while to get a better look at something or other. At the front of one shop stood two lifesize, green-haired papier-mache mermaids with arms outspread, guarding a giant clam. In another shop hung a painted cow skull. [Note--yep--both of those were real.] They never saw any shrunken heads.
As they walked along Javier stopped and peered ahead into the crowd, where it thinned out a bit, nearing the end of the shop section of the dock. "Hey, Dami. You have any idea what that Lucien guy looks like?"
"No," Damien said. "He never described himself. I guess he thought we'd meet him at his apartment. Why?"
"Well, there's some guy down there. Latin looking. There's this weird kid hanging around him."
Damien went to Javier's side to get a look. Further down the dock a man dressed in brightly colored shorts and shirt with a baseball cap was walking, hands in pockets, staring down at the dock, a trippy-looking blond kid with his hair flying in his face every time he moved practically bouncing around him. Damien thought of those old Warner Brothers cartoons with the big bulldog and the little terrier that leapt about him yapping, "He's my hee-ro!"
"That's kinda funny," Yoopy interrupted his chain of thought, saying, "They look just like those two silly dogs in those old cartoons, the ones where I think the bulldog got the shit kicked out of him by that kangaroo."
It's spreading. Damien lifted his eyes to the sky. He stepped forward, gently pushing his way out of the crowd of Spring Break vacationers.
When the man in the baseball hat looked up and saw Damien coming for him, he stopped, glanced back over both his shoulders as if trying to decide it was he Damien was looking for. The blond kid stopped hopping around also, got a guarded look on his face, and shied away to the side. The man with the hat just looked Damien up and down as he approached, openly curious.
"Hi," Damien said. "I'm not quite sure, but I was wondering if you knew a Lucien Constanzo."
The man blinked. "Yeah, that's me. Who're you?"
Damien let out his breath, realizing he'd been holding it almost since he'd started walking their way. Finally. "I'm Damien. You wrote to me in your letter."
The man's face lit up immediately. "Oh!" He gave a wide grin. "Oh! Hi! How're you doin'?" He took Damien's hand automatically and started shaking. The blond kid stepped forward a bit, still a little suspicious looking, now glancing from one of them to the other as Damien's friends joined them.
"Gee, I almost completely forgot," Lucien babbled, still pumping Damien's arm up and down enthusiastically. "I guess I shoulda left some kind of note on my door or somethin', you've probably been lookin' all over for me--"
"Yeah, kind of," Damien managed to get out.
"--just been so busy lately, what with Spring Break and all, you know; how're you doin', anyway?" He quit shaking Damien's hand and slapped his arm--a little hard, as Damien winced--almost as if they were old pals. "Hope the flight wasn't too long. Hear you've been gettin' some bad weather up there. Sorry this all had to come up at such a time. Us, we never get too much snow, 'specially way down here. I can't remember when we last had snow. But I do know it was like less than a centimeter, and all the cars went off the roads." He laughed, and this time punched the blond kid's arm. "You remember that, Travis? Are you old enough to remember that?"
"I dunno," the blond kid said, grinning a little stupidly. "I prob'ly stayed inside all day."
Lucien started laughing again. Damien continued rubbing his arm, wondering if maybe he'd had a little too much coffee that morning. "But you, I s'pose you all keep right on them roads, 'cause you got chains on your tires or sand in the trunk or somethin', right? How exactly do you handle all that snow?"
Damien was still trying to get over hearing him say "you all" rather than the expected "y'all." He shook his head, telling himself to get rid of that stupid expectation. Of course they wouldn't all talk like that. "I don't know, we just drive carefully," he said, and nearly cringed back at Lucien's almost maniacal laughter.
"Yeah, I s'pose you do! Fifty-five miles an hour. Pfft. We'll teach you how to drive right down here. [Note--when I was in Texas, they all drove like MANIACS.] Oh, stupid of me. This is Travis Trayer. This is Damien, and--" He looked at Damien's friends, all curiosity again.
"Yoopy Irvins, D. J. Broderick, and Javier Martinez," Damien introduced them, waving his hand at them vaguely. Lucien Constanzo bobbed his head, putting a finger to the bill of his hat. Travis just nodded.
"Real nice to meet you all. I really hope I didn't drag you down here for nothin'. But three bodies, jeez, sounds kinda like somethin' might be up, don't you think?"
Damien nodded a bit quickly. "Maybe we'd be better off discussing this elsewhere."
"Oh, of course. Come on. If you've all had somethin' to eat, then we can head back to my place and talk this out."
They ended up back at the Sandpiper Motel, where Lucien continued his incessant babbling as he bent to unlock his door. "...third one on the beach this time, like the first one, but not the second, 'cause it wasn't on the beach, of course. But all of 'em, throats cut, looked surprised. Like it came on 'em all sudden." The lock clicked and he let them in. Damien stopped and the other three bumped into him while Travis squeezed around them into the room. The singer looked around. He immediately felt awkward.
It was such a little place. He'd never lived in an apartment; and he'd always thought of living apartments as bigger places. Not motel rooms. There was just the bed, and a TV and shelf where an icebox rested, and a more open area where he assumed another bed had once stood. A poker table was there now instead, with two plastic chairs sitting by it. Long curtains were drawn against the opposite wall.
"--But anyways Travis says he heard from somewhere, won't tell me where, there was a guy who said maybe I'd be interested in seein' this thing on the beach and all, didn't say what, so we both went down there like in the middle of the night and found him--"
Lucien went around the room, tidying it up a bit here and there, inviting them to sit at the table. "There's, how many, four of you? Hold on, I'll get more chairs." He went to the curtains and pulled them open. Damien and the others backed away, squinting and blinking as light poured into the room. The curtains didn't only hide windows, they hid a balcony. [Note--this is what our room looked like...except there was an iron mark on the floor.]
"Wow," Yoopy whispered, making a beeline for the glass doors. Lucien stepped outside to retrieve a couple more chairs and bring them in. Yoopy put his hands on the balcony's edge and leaned over, scanning the ocean.
"Oh, that? Yeah, guess you don't see too much of that where you're from, huh? Pretty good view, ain't it? That's what I like most 'bout this place." Lucien set down the chairs and waved his hand. "Come on, come on, y'all sit down. Lord knows I put you up to so much walkin' around on my part, shoulda just left a note on my door..."
Damien noticed he did contract "you" and "all" this time. He sat down facing the balcony and looked up to see Yoopy reluctantly come back in.
No comments:
Post a Comment