make a sale and this lady hit me in the head with a hammer and I fell off her ladder and then I couldn’t get up and she has this creepy kid that was always staring at me with his little witch and- I’m sorry. I’m babbling.”
“At least you can still leave.”
“You can’t?”
The man finally looked up. He had a deer’s head and his nose was a blinking red light.
I nearly fell off of the stool.
“Are you the guy that hit me with a car? Did you do this to me?”
“No. It wasn’t me. I swear.”
“Somebody did it.” He took a slug from the bottle. “And they just kept driving.”
I slid back from the deer man cautiously. “I think I’m going mad.”
“We’re all mad here.”
“Well, I’m not joining you. I’m getting out of here.”
“If you don’t, you might end up like him.” He pointed to a man’s head – a man that bore a remarkable resemblance to me - mounted on the wall above the bar. “Isn’t that right, Karl?”
“Is that Karl Chevsky?”
“Is it? Are we playing a game? Or is it someone else we know?”
I bolted upright on the woman’s couch. It was another nightmare. I was covered in sweat, my head and my back killing me, my brain feeling like it was on fire even though the room was quite cold. It was hours before I fell back to sleep.
The next morning I woke up face to face with the witch. Tyler was holding the bizarre figure next to my nose, its fingers extended menacingly. Meril sat next to Tyler watching him. Their mother walked in and leaned against the wall. “You want one of the apples from the tree outside?”
“I’m not eating one of your apples.”
“Are you hinting my apples aren’t what they ought to be?” She walked off angrily.
“You want a glass of water?” Tyler asked. “Ours is the world’s best.”
“I heard that was Buhl. Says so on their water tower, right?”
“They lie.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Why not?”
“He fell through the lake a couple of winters ago while he was playing hockey. The tow got hold of him and dragged him away. A few weeks later, my aunt found him just below the surface of the ice about a half mile from where he went in – still had his hockey stick in his hand. She brought me down to the lake to see him. They had to chainsaw the ice for hours to get his body out of the lake. His hand was just about frozen solid so they sawed his hockey stick in half so that they could put him in the pickup without breaking his fingers off.”
“Why did your aunt let you see all of that? Why didn’t she just tell you that he died of a heart attack, or in a car accident, or better yet, peacefully in his sleep?”
“You shouldn’t lie to kids. No one should. It’s bad luck.”
“You don’t tell kids horrible things like that.”
“I still have both halves of his hockey stick in my room to remember him by. My auntie saved them for me. Want to see them?”
“What the hell is wrong with you people?”
Tyler got up and walked off, looking dejected.
“I miss my Auntie Jenna.” Meril moved a little closer, into the spot vacated by the older child Tyler.
“Where’d she go? Your aunt.”
“To Acara.”
“That pretty far away?”
“No. They gave her to Acara.”
“Who’s he? Who’s Acara?”
“It’s not a he. It’s an owl god.”
“Who gave your aunt to an owl god?”
“Our city. Coleraine.”
“Your aunt was sacrificed to an owl god by the people of this city?”
“Not an owl god. The owl god – Acara.”
“Why’d they do that?”
“We have to once in a while.”
“Why’d they choose your aunt?”
“Aunt Jenna? She isn’t my real aunt. She was kinda careless about sex I guess, and she had a lot of parking tickets that she hadn’t tried too hard to pay, and she didn’t even graduate high school, barely had any direction in life. That’s what the council said.”
“Shit, that’s a serious penalty for a few unpaid parking tickets and an occasional one night stand. Are they gonna do that to me?”
“I ‘on’t know.” He looked worried. “I think they’re going to do that to me though.”
“Sacrifice you to the owl god? They wouldn’t do something like that to a kid, would they?” I was horrified by the thought. “Wouldn’t your mom stop them?”
“She’s not really my mom. That’s why I don’t look like her. She found me in a parking lot when I was four.”
“She kidnapped you?”
“She said she found me. Finders keepers”
“Listen, no one’s going to sacrifice you to an owl god. You hear me? I won’t let that happen.”
“Do you promise?”
“Yes, I promise. I really don’t think anyone would do that but I’ll make certain it doesn’t happen. Don’t you worry.”
Meril nodded.
“But we’ve got to find a way out of here.”
“You still can’t walk?”
“I took a really bad fall off that ladder. There’s something seriously wrong with my back.”
I stared at a spider that was making its way across the ceiling for a couple of moments before the kid spoke again.
“My mom talked to the witchdoctor – er - medicine man about you last night.”
“Medicine man? You said witchdoctor first.”
“He’s some kind of doctor.”
“Are you sure?”
“I guess. Tyler says he is. He’s an Apache Indian. He heals people around here. If there’s time he might come by later tonight and see if he can fix you.”
“Fix me?”
The kid nodded.
“Tell your mom, no, I need a real doctor.”
Meril started to leave but turned and asked me, “Do you like to read?”
“No. Books are for people who like to waste time. Don’t you have cable television?”
“No. Mom says television comes straight from the devil”
“Yet she sacrificed her own sister to an owl god. Do you have a DVD player?”
He shook his head.
“A VCR?”
“We have books.”
“Okay. What do you have?”
“We have the Bible, a couple of Oprah Winfrey’s magazines, or The Sun Also Rises by Hemmandway.”
“That’s Hemmingway. What seven year old isn’t familiar with Hemmingway?” I asked sarcastically but he didn’t get the joke. “I’ll take the Oprah magazines.”
I fell asleep reading about Oprah and Gail on their road trip across America just to have a nightmare that the deer with the blinking nose was riding behind them in the back seat with a knife and the owl god was perched unbeknownst to the duo just above their heads, on top of the car, waiting for their souls. A deer really couldn’t maneuver a knife with hooves but then again it was a ghost deer and that might have to be taken into account, I debated internally after I realized I had been dreaming. I switched over to reading the Bible. I read Ecclesiastes.
I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?
Perhaps that deer I encountered on the roadside was in heaven, I considered.
Later in the evening, I laid on the couch listening to the crickets. The kid had opened the window to freshen up the room that was really starting to ripen. Unfortunately, there was a tear in the scree
n and the mosquitoes that got into the house were as big as humming birds. I found himself wondering if these vampire hybrids could drain a man of enough blood overnight so that all that remained by morning was a pale white sunken bag of a corpse.
“Better get under cover, Tyler. There’s a storm blowin’ up - a whopper, to speak in the vernacular of the peasantry.”
The voice inside my head was followed by one standing above me. I had fallen asleep again.
“Look at him. Snug and warm on your couch like a fat bloated wood tick burrowed into the fleshy bits on a bloodhound. He’s just lovin the free ride.”
“You know, they could use him.”
“I suppose.”
I blinked my eyes into reality and this time the man spoke to me rather than about me.
“Ah, the Bible, good book. Still - kind’ve confusing sometimes.”
Clad in a jean jacket, and holding the Bible that I had laid on the floor by my side, with the whipping light thrown from a roaring fireplace behind him, the man towered above me like a myth, his shadow appearing and disappearing, leaping across the insides of the room, like snakes escaping up the wall. I had pictured the witchdoctor in animal skins and feathers but here he stood in jeans stained old to a shine and a pair of road-eaten Harley boots. On his shoulder was a patch with a skull in Indian headdress.
“Are you a good witch, or a bad witch?” the witchdoctor asked me.
“I’m not a witch at all,” answered the voice inside my head, but I said nothing.
“You like the way the Fatboy handles?” the woman asked the witchdoctor.
“It has a nice powerful feel like riding a big horse – like a Clydesdale.”
“I prefer a smaller bike,” she said.
“I bet you thought witches rode brooms, didn’t you, city man?” he said, looking down at me.
“I never gave much thought to witches riding motorcycles. This would be the first time.” I tried to sit up but found that I was still too weak. “You got