Voodoo Queen

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     The man who was flitting about her like a hummingbird was named David Soileau, and he had been frequenting Maison Blanche every Tuesday night for the past three months.  At first Mary thought of him as a typical customer who would come once every five or six months, and whose face would be eminently forgettable.  But David Soileau surprised her acuity, and continued to come every week, as punctual as clockwork, always to see the same girl, Emma Ledoux.  David Soileau became ritualistic in his meetings with Emma, always arriving in the same fastidious, bizarre dress: a pair of ironed black slacks, black socks, black shoes with a shiny silver buckle, and a long sleeved canary yellow shirt with baby blue buttons.  He combed his hair to the left, and his punctilio had so impressed Mary Lavoi the Voodoo Queen, that she applied her mojo to the Tarot cards one misty Wednesday morning, long after Soileau had left Maison Blanche, during the pearl-grey dawn before the sun rose.  She discovered that Soileau would one day sell his soul to the devil for Emma’s hand in marriage, and that she would be the one to create his love potion.  But Mary did not believe her own cards, and she denied vehemently to herself that Tiresias could see what the future held, so she hid the Tarot cards in the folds of her long white dress and brought forth three pairs of dice made from the bones of a human, and whose pips were inked with the dye of octopi.  The six dice were to foretell the future, and she only allowed herself to use them once every ten years and on Easter Sundays.  But it was not Easter Sunday, and she had not used them since she was young and in love, so Mary the Voodoo Queen dropped the dice into a highball cup made of sugar cane, shook the bone dice, and cast them onto her wooden table, muttering spells and praying through the Virgin Mary.  The dice popped and jumped across the table, and every time they nearly settled, the dice jumped again, because the spirits of the human were still alive inside their bone forms, and when at last the six dice ceased to move, their exegesis of the events of David Soileau’s life caused Mary to throw the table on its side and to collapse in anguish.

          So it was an indomitable feeling of dread that rose within Mary when she saw David Soileau waiting for her outside the St. Louis Cathedral.  Yet the dread was really more than that, Mary realized as she walked along with him, not listening to him, because she already knew she would one day do as he asked.  The feeling of dread was really a feeling of hopelessness and diminishment, because Mary Lavoi felt like a domino poised to fall in a long string of other dominos whose destiny was merely to stand, then to be pushed over.  And the dominos, Mary felt, had been set in motion already, and the tinkling of one domino striking another could be heard in the distance.  It would be her turn to fall soon, Mary reflected, and the fait accompli she was destined by God and the occult to perform intertwined her life with Beelzebub and the funny man in the canary shirt who carefully parted his hair to the left.

If only to break Soileau’s incessant buzzing she said, “Stop.”

          It was Monday at noon, the day that Dr. Monroe pedaled his squeaking blue bicycle down Charles Street, through the throngs of lounging people, and past Maison Blanche.  When Mary saw him, she called, “Dr. Monroe!  Dr. Monroe!  Dr. Monroe!  Stop!  There’s a man here who is sick.” 

          “I’m not sick,” muttered David Soileau, throwing Mary a dirty look.  “I’m only in love.” 

          “You’re in love with a ghost,” Mary replied firmly.  “You’ll never have her.  I won’t make you the potion.” 

          Dr. Monroe had turned his bicycle around, and the squeaks of the bicycle grew louder until at last he stopped in front of Mary Lavoi and David Soileau.  Dr. Monroe was a tall man, urbane, very much immersed in the times: the times of the past and of the present.  He had been blessed with a miraculous memory and could recall details from his youth that no one else could remember, not even his mother.  “You once told me, ‘Gaston, go wash your body!  Otherwise, the mosquitoes will eat you alive.’ but even then, Momma, I knew the mosquitoes would eat my body whether I had showered or not, but I bathed anyways, because you’re my mother.”  And Dr. Monroe could sort through the bricolage of the day’s events, finding threads of politics, medicine, society, and culture then bringing them all together in his organized mind, so that the people of the French Quarter looked to him for interpretation of the present. 

          “I’m not sick,” repeated David Soileau to the doctor. 

          “You are,” said Dr. Monroe.  “You’re in love.”

          David Soileau looked from the voodoo queen to the man of medicine and fled. 

That night, following the explicit instructions given to him by a witch from the Houma swamps, David Soileau collected the eyes of four alligators, the leg of a stork, a mink oil unguent, and his own blood, leeched from his leg.  When the ingredients were collected, he pitched them into his crucible, boiling them in the briny water of the swamps, and stirring them with the crooked branch of a cypress tree.  Taking his Bible from off his shelf, he turned to Revelations and murmured a few words from the Satanic Verses, which appear when the third verse of every chapter is read backwards.  At that moment, he shut his eyes as tightly as he could, clapped the Holy Book shut, silently wished for the love of Emma Ledoux, and sold his soul to the devil. 

          The next day, when David Soileau appeared at the Maison Blanche in a general malaise, brimming with feelings of remorse and doubt, he asked Mary Lavoi if there was a cure for people who had sold their souls to the devil. 

“I saw it in the cards months ago,” she replied.  “There ain’t no cure for what you’ve done.” 

As she said that, Emma Ledoux came down the stairs, smelling of sweat and men, her quadroon face and her quadroon hair brown and mixed, like a pony of too many races, and on her fingers were little bands – bronze painted the color of gold – because when she was young her mother, who was a vindictive woman who hated all children – even her own – told Emma that she would always be second best on the inside.

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