A mixture of disbelief and glee melted up from Hettie’s face, as if he had promised something both improbable and wonderful, like the promise of an afterlife. ‘You do dis fah me?’
‘Yes.’
She talked in a breathy whisper, fingering her shell, head bowed, offering a litany of explanation, describing lives bound by magical pattern, security guaranteed by the repetition of behavior, and Mingolla began to wonder about the similarity between Hettie’s luck and his ritual of survival, the idiosyncrasies of the chopper pilots and of various other acquaintances back in Guatemala. All these behaviors shared the same delusionary character, and given that Hettie was essentially a test subject upon which fledgling psychics worked their changes, it could be that psychics were responsible in every instance, that the delusions were the product of their influence. He tried to dismiss this as paranoia, but found that he could not.
Hettie sat back on her haunches, silent, waiting for luck to be bestowed; her dress had ridden up, exposing the shadowy division between her thighs. Mingolla had no luck to give her, only desire, the one emotion he knew how to shape. Yet desire was powerful in him now. He was alive with it, alive with the power behind it. Everywhere he looked it seemed that the world was being enriched by the pressure of his vision. The weathered boards, the light beading silver on the cobwebs, the ruddy wood of the table, all these things seemed to shine brighter than before. Maybe, he thought, if desire was strong enough, it would effect luck. As he directed it toward her, he saw that luck, the feeling of being blessed with good fortune, also had a shape, and he incorporated that into the push of desire.
With an indrawn breath, Hettie arched her back, and, hands spread wide, caressed her belly, her breasts, pressing their rounds flat, kneading them. Watching her, Mingolla understood that his gift of desire and luck could have a return, that he could make love to her, that here among the moths and cobwebs he could commit an act of pure usage, almost of violence, of pleasure taken without toll or penance. And he was tempted. There was a peculiar tension in his body, a mingling of confidence and indecision, the way he had felt after receiving a pass at the top of the key, watching the waist of the man guarding him, not knowing whether to break right or left, leaning forward like a reluctant diver and letting gravity slowly take him, waiting until his opponent had seen—or thought he’d seen—a hint of direction, had shifted his weight in anticipation, placing himself at a disadvantage that would allow Mingolla to penetrate the lane. Hettie’s head lolled, her hips lifted. Sweat beaded her upper lip, the hollow of her throat. Abandon had refined her looks to an animal delicacy, and Mingolla reached for her, thinking of Debora, her delicacy. But at that moment she cried out, went down on all fours, hips thrusting at nothing, crying out again, more softly, hoarsely, and in her mind there was flurrying as of a million fish responding to a danger sign, scattering, their space filled by a lazy current, a sluggish tingling wash.
Wind battered the shed, vibrating the tin roof. Hettie remained on all fours, staring dull-eyed at Mingolla through the fat coils of her dreadlocks. He was glad he hadn’t taken her, because she was too easy a beast, because he wanted someone whose mind had not been walked through time and again. He got to his feet, and she followed him with her eyes; he moved around her to the table, and she turned her head, displaying no more emotion than a cow.
‘Get up!’ he said, irritated. But irritation gave way to pity, and when she stood, hands limp at her sides, he asked if she was all right.
‘I…’ She made a halfhearted effort at smoothing wrinkles on her dress. ‘T’ings dey comin’ clear.’
‘What things?’
‘T’ings of de luck.’
Branches ticked the wall of the shed, a wave boomed on the reef.
‘Better we find de others.’ Hettie came a step toward Mingolla, eyes wide, fidgeting with her shell. ‘Dis luck ’nough to make dem all catch a fire.’
Silver-blue clouds scudded across the moon, and a seamless dark flowed over the hotel grounds. Then the moon sailed clear, and the grounds became a floating puzzle of light and shadow: the edges of fronds, sprigs of round leathery sea-grape leaves, bamboo stalks, all illuminated by swatches of moonlight, all bounded by toiling blackness, rustling, seething, a troubled noise audible above the whispery vowels of wind and sea. Hettie beckoned to Mingolla, saying, Come, you follow!’ Mingolla waved at her, picking his way cautiously through the thicket toward the hotel, its white stucco ablaze between the arching trunks of palms, the open windows black as caves. The thrashing of the pitch-dark foliage seemed to empower him: he felt he was growing stronger with every step, storing inside himself the wildness of the night.
They turned away from the hotel into thicker brush, a path choked with ferns and fleshy-leaved plants, and came to a large clearing of packed dirt surrounding a bungalow with board walls and a conical thatched roof. Candles flickered in the doorway, each point of flame centering an orange nimbus. ‘I bring dem fah you,’ Hettie said, and went inside the bungalow, leaving Mingolla standing beside a palmetto. He was antsy and couldn’t understand why. It must be the brilliance of the moon, the way it spotlit him, he thought, and to elude that silvery eye, he moved closer to the palmetto, entering the tickling embrace of its fronds.
One by one islanders emerged from the bungalow, nearly a dozen black men and women, old, young, uniformly undernourished and ragged, all holding painted shells or some other fetish. Shadows collected in the folds of their clothing, in their wrinkles and eyesockets, giving them the appearance of walking dead. Their silence seemed to be dimming the moon’s wattage, muting the voice of the wind. Hettie urged them forward, but Mingolla did not let them get near, lashing out with his mind and halting their shambling approaches, tying inside their heads that intricate knot with which he had bound Hettie, and then firing them with good fortune, with other emotions whose shapes he was coming to know. They grunted as he struck, their eyes rolled and flashed with pure charges of moonlight; they muttered prayerfully, backing away, taking up positions at the perimeter of the clearing, fixing him with awed stares. Each exercise of power enlivened him, and when he had done he sat down in the dirt, calm at the center of their stares, but sensing himself the epicenter of a strange weather, a storm with impalpable winds that blew from a world just around the corner and passed without leaving a trace of damage, yet changed everything. He felt a need for normalcy, and spotting Hettie in the door of the bungalow, he called her over, asked her to sit. She lowered to her knees beside him, her hands clasped demurely in her lap.
‘Where you live, Hettie?’ he asked.
‘I lives here.’
‘I mean before you came here… where’d you live then?’
The concept of ‘before’ seemed to befuddle her, but at length she said, ‘My daddy have a little place out to Flowers Bay.’ Then, after a considerable pause: ‘He raise ponies.’
‘Yeah?’ said Mingolla, thinking that ponies and Flowers Bay sounded idyllic. ‘Why’d you leave?’
‘It were de ponies. Dem little children, dey wild! All de time tossin’ dere heads, givin’ you de duppy eye. Make me fearful to be ’mong dem.’
One of the other islanders—a man sitting in the shade of a sea-grape bush—let out a keening wail and lifted his hands to the moon.
‘Ponies ain’t goin’ to hurtcha,’ Mingolla said.
‘Oh, yes! All t’ings be hurtful when dere duppy loose.’ Hettie brushed her fingers across his knee, a reassuring touch. ‘But you be too strong for de duppies, mon.’
Her expression was in partial eclipse, half-moonlit, half-shadowed, impossible to read, but he detected in her a clouded regret, the trace of some sadness whose particulars she could no longer remember. He had wanted to talk with her, to pretend he was having an ordinary conversation with a pretty girl; but she was only the husk of a pretty girl, and there was nothing ordinary about either of them.
His thoughts turned again to Debora, and again he was confused by his fixation on her. He didn’t believe he was in love with her, he didn’t see how that could be possible. But this sort of thing, this long, almost unconscious study of another person, had once led him to fall in love, and he hoped that wasn’t the case now. He had a low opinion of love, of its power to distract and injure, though he was forced to admit that distraction and injury were good teachers. The woman he’d loved was five years older than he, one of those pretty upper middle class housewives common to the better neighborhoods of Long Island, with a penchant for ceramic jewelry and denim skirts, for charitable works inspired by boredom with their husbands, always looking for a glimmer of excitement to brighten them, yet not really expecting anything, seduced by the role they had accepted into believing that their lives were ruled by a canon of mediocrity, that boredom was their lot. He had been teaching a sketching class at the Y, and two weeks after she had joined the class, they had begun an affair. Everything had been perfect at first, but
