The Crucifixion Killing, as it was being called, had the media doing cartwheels. The news of Paul Klein being found with drugs had somehow leaked out. The early reports that had portrayed him as the best and the brightest, as an athlete-scholar, suddenly changed. Reporters were now saying Klein was suspected of being a drug dealer.
It was almost ten o’clock when I made it home. There were no clouds in the sky, but that only made it that much darker and colder. For a few moments, I sat in my driveway. I didn’t want to go into an empty house, and I was afraid of what my dreams might bring.
January, I thought. The month was a black hole, and I didn’t have the gravity to resist its pull. Staying active wasn’t helping. Much as I didn’t want to admit it, the darkness was sucking me in.
Sirius made a whining sound, and I reached my hand back to his muzzle. He was focused on something, and that’s when I noticed the lights coming from my next-door neighbor’s house. On a dark street there was one point of light. My neighbor’s living room curtains were open and the glow from inside his house dispelled the shadows. There was only the one car in the driveway, a Jaguar with the personalized license plate of SHAMAN.
There was a reason my partner was fixated on the house. One of his favorite humans in the world lived there. As if on cue, my neighbor’s front door opened and he stepped out on the porch.
“Let’s go see our favorite fakir,” I told Sirius.
My partner didn’t need to be told twice and raced off for Seth Mann’s door.
When Seth first moved in, I remember asking him what he did. “I’m a shaman,” he told me.
Wondering if I’d heard correctly, I said, “So, on your mortgage application, that’s what you wrote down as your occupation? Shaman?”
“Of course,” he said.
Maybe shamanism is a growth industry. Although his job isn’t run-of-the-mill, Seth has always been a great neighbor and friend. After Jennifer died he did all the organizing I couldn’t bring myself to do, and when Sirius and I were being treated in the burn unit, Seth helped us in every way imaginable. He even supplied the two of us with a homemade balm that he said would bring us relief. His potion smelled rank, but it did seem to have some healing properties, or maybe it was the beer that Seth invariably snuck in with his potion. Because Seth and Sirius are thick as thieves, whenever I leave town my partner vacations next door.
Before I even got a chance to enter into his house, Seth extended a bottle of Sam Adams my way. My shaman only drinks premium beer.
“Did you divine the kind of day I had?”
“No,” he said, “but there was divine intervention of a sort. Father Pat was worried about you. Apparently, you didn’t return his calls. I found him waiting for you on your front porch.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Not to worry,” Seth said. “I invited him inside. We had a nice talk and toddy. I promised Father Pat that I would see to your spiritual needs tonight.”
“I’d rather you saw to my toddy needs.”
Father Pat and Seth didn’t exactly practice the same religion, but each enjoyed the other’s company. On several occasions I had been party to their wide-ranging discussions. As strange as it seemed, each had great respect for the other. On very different paths they had found God.
Seth’s house reflects his travels. He’s been all over the world spending time with medicine men, witch doctors, healers, and sages. During Seth’s journey to become a shaman, he was even adopted by a tribe deep in the Amazon rain forest. By the sounds of his initiation ceremony, it’s not a tribe I’ll be joining any time soon. I was pleased to see my two shrunken heads now on display, gifts I’d presented Seth at his recent birthday party. After he told me he’d spent time working with a Shuar medicine man and then mentioning in passing that not too long ago the Shuar were infamous for shrinking the heads of their enemies, the shrunken heads seemed like an obvious present. The two heads look the real thing; one of them even bears a miniature resemblance to Seth’s round face, fan ears, flat nose, and hooded eyes. What it doesn’t show is his big smile and even bigger stomach. Imagine a cross between a koala and the happy Buddha, and that’s Seth.
By now I was used to the figurines, masks, rattles, drums, and effigy figures displayed on the wall shelving throughout the house. There was also no shortage of native pottery, vases, and baskets. Tobacco leaves and other pungent herbs filled bowls and containers and contributed to a beguiling aroma that filled the house. I have always made a point of never looking too closely at what kind of herbs are in the house.
Seth does workshops and has a loyal clientele. He says that his work requires him to be a combination of psychotherapist, healer, and social worker. Before becoming a shaman, Seth was a financial manager at an insurance company. One day he was wearing a suit, he told me, and the next he found himself being “liberated” in the Amazon rain forest. At least once a year, Seth returns to the jungle for what he calls a “refresher course.” Invariably, Seth says, he drinks ayahuasca, a brew made from a plant known as the visionary vine, and the vine of the dead. Evidently, what doesn’t destroy you makes you a better shaman.
I plopped down in an easy chair while Sirius sprawled out in his hemp dog bed, filled with organic millet hulls that Seth had bought for him. A drug-sniffing dog probably wouldn’t have looked as comfortable as Sirius did. Seth brought over a water bowl for him before taking a seat on the sofa.
“Father Pat didn’t offer particulars,” he said, “probably a confessional thing, but he did say you were working a difficult case.”
“He only got the first part of my day,” I said. “It got worse. I’m working two cases now. One you probably haven’t heard anything about; the other you’ve probably heard too much.”
I told him about baby Rose and Paul Klein. Seth is a good listener, and I surprised myself by talking at length. He took my empty and brought me another beer while I talked about the cases.
“They’re both so quirky,” I finally said.
Seth asked, “How so?”
“Rose was found with pink bootees. I have never heard of an abandoned baby wearing bootees. And they weren’t just any bootees. They were knit by hand. In fact, someone knit a blue pair as well. We found those at the crime scene. I’m thinking the mother didn’t know if she was carrying a boy or a girl, so she had both colors. But why did she go to the effort of getting bootees if she was going to throw away her own kid?”
“She cared about her child,” Seth said. “She wanted her to be warm.”
“She didn’t care about her enough.”
I looked into my bottle. There were no answers there, but I brought it up to my lips anyway and tilted it.
“If I find the time tomorrow, I’ll be doing bootee calls,” I said. “Assuming the mom didn’t knit the bootees, she must have bought them someplace.”
“I hope you find what you are looking for.”
As usual, Seth’s words were ambiguous. “What aren’t you saying?”
“Father Pat wouldn’t have come seeking you out if he wasn’t worried about how you might react to this case.”
“This case isn’t about me. It’s about an abandoned baby that died.”
“Then you shouldn’t mind that we’re concerned about the abandoned baby that lived.”
“That baby is fine, thank you. But he could use insights into this case.”
Seth took a sip from his beer, thought a moment, and then recited:
“God appears and God is light, to those poor souls who dwell in night, but does a human form display, to those who dwell in realms of day.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Those are the last four lines of William Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence.’ I think Blake was commenting on perception. He understood that things appear different in daytime and nighttime, even though they are the same. When I…journey, I understand this.”
“You’re talking about your soul flights?”
He heard my skepticism and said, “If the sun and moon should doubt, they would immediately go out.” And then he smiled and said, “More Blake.”
Seth talked about soul flights the way someone else might talk about going to Italy. As I understand it, even though his body stays grounded, his awareness-his soul-goes places. During his flights, Seth says he has an “awakened” vision and is able to see things he wouldn’t be able to otherwise. I guess what he was saying to me was that in my unenlightened state I probably didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground.
