Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [26]
So sign me up for Oprah, Melissa thought, the other woman in my life is a voodoo god. The sense of a third presence grew on her like guilt, like it was the haunting of every bad thing she’d ever done. Voodoo, living right here in her house: she was enough of a lapsed Baptist to know what they would say. Cast OFF that demon! Satan get THEE behind! Sur-REN-der is the key that unlocks sal-VA-shun! Here in the buckle of the Bible Belt religious messages were available in all styles, from sugar-lipped warbling to hillbilly gibbering to the sonic stampede of call-and-response. The susceptible could easily find themselves bombarded by signals, and Melissa was, now, for the first time in her life, though actual religion still seemed strange to her. God was out there somewhere, she believed, and beyond that everything else was up for grabs, but as Dirk told his stories those first few weeks she began to understand a little of it, how a shock to the system might trigger a bizarre religious kick. Though really, was there any other kind? In your face was how he summed up Haiti for her, a place where everything happened altogether all at once, food, sweat, shit, grace, god, sex, and death, the raw and the cooked of life coming at you without any of the modern veneers.
“One day we set up a checkpoint out on the highway,” he told her, “we were spot-checking all the SUVs for weapons. Then this big flatbed truck comes humping along, and there in the back, piled up in this huge mound are all these cow heads, hundreds and hundreds of bloody cow heads. So after it passes we’re all laughing and yelling at each other like, Hey, did you see that? Can you believe that shit? Cause once it was gone you weren’t sure you’d really seen it.”
She got it, sort of, how fluid and free your mind might become when life took on the quality of hallucination. How that might blow your coping strategies all to hell? Dirk meditated daily in the middle of the den, which Melissa took for a joke at first—Green Berets, snake-eaters, did not meditate, nor did anyone else she knew except people from Chapel Hill. “Keeping it real” was how he explained himself; meanwhile Melissa took wary note of her dreams and watched her life fill up with nagging signs and portents. FORBIDDEN FRUIT CREATES JAMS, read the message of the week on Calvary Baptist’s streetside sign, which Melissa passed each day going to and from work. A few miles farther on, First Methodist inquired: ETERNITY—SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING? Pondering Satan, carrying on her nominally normal life, she didn’t feel so much fear as a kind of fraught spaciness, maybe fear spread thin. Then one Tuesday evening she and Dirk were cuddled on the couch, watching a M*A*S*H rerun while voodoo-trance music submarined through the walls. It began as a joke, a tease, Melissa’s hand crabwalking up her husband’s thigh, sneaking higher and higher until it reached his lap. Dirk smiled without turning from the TV and gently set her hand aside.
Thirty seconds later she was at it again.
“Melissa.”
“What?” she cooed, all floozy innocence.
“You know I can’t mess around tonight.”
“I’m not doing anything,” she blandly protested, but she giggled and found him hard when she squeezed again.
“Melissa!” The alarm in his voice hooked something fierce in her. He was helpless, she could fuck him anytime she wanted.
“Melissa, give me a break.”
“I’m not doing anything!”
“Yes you are. And I’m asking you to stop it, please.”
She jumped him with a vengeance then, scooching up on her knees and grabbing his belt, hanging on as he backpedaled down the couch. They were laughing as she pinned him against the cushions, both of them gasping in strained little bursts.
“Whoa, Lissa.”
“Gimme somma that!” She’d freed enough of his belt to wank it around