Читать книгу Minnow - James E. McTeer II - Страница 9

Minnow felt the money in his pocket and heaved in a great breath. He thought about his mother and his father back home. The sun was at its apex, risen from the hot morning to blaze down like a torch over the Lowcountry. Midday had come and now slowly diminished, and his mother would wonder why he'd taken so long on Bay Street. Maybe she'd even consider looking for him, leaving his father's side.

He entered the shack and had room to stand only because of its neatness. It was dark and dusty, with only a crack of a window up at the top of the wall that faced the river. Dr. Crow sat in a chair in one corner, with his back to a set of great tall shelves that spanned the wall and reached to the ceiling. A little coal stove with a pipe poked out the side wall, before which Minnow saw a short table, a stool, and a cupboard. The place smelled like desiccated wood. Like an ancient relic pulled from the dry earth.

Dr. Crow sat there with an unlit cigarette in his hand. He held an unstruck match in the other, and he stayed frozen, looking at Minnow.

"You a brave one to come in here. They tell you about me?"

"A few sailors told me the way."

"But that's not who sent you."

"No sir."

"But who sent you told you not to tell."

"I'm not supposed to."

"You supposed to talk to crazy negroes like me?"

"I talk to who I like to talk to. Nobody's out. Not at first, at least."

"Your daddy know that?"

"My father's sick and wouldn't care."

"I know he sick."

"Yessir."

"And you need medicine."

"Yessir."

Dr. Crow struck the match against his shoe and lit the skinny cigarette. He pursed his brown, wrinkled lips and inhaled. The match's sulfur burned Minnow's nose, but the cigarette gave a soothingly pungent vanilla aroma.

"Who told you I had it?" Dr. Crow asked.

"I told him I wouldn't say."

"A man at the pharmacy. In town."

Minnow looked out the door, then back at Dr. Crow.

"On Bay Street?" Dr. Crow asked.

Minnow stayed still.

Dr. Crow blew a stream of smoke out of his mouth. His lips opened, and he laughed. The dry, loud laugh filled the shack. It turned into a cackle that trailed off into a sigh.

"He make you pay for it?"

"No one in town had the medicine."

"I mean to find me. He take your money?"

"Some of it. But I have more."

Minnow dug his fingers into his pocket, but Dr. Crow held his own spidery hand out before Minnow could get the billfold. The palm was light brown, fingers like brown bones, the cigarette pinched between two long digits. The smoke from the tip curled in semicircles before disappearing into the shadows at the ceiling of the shack.

"Don't get no money out in here. I won't take it."

"Please."

Minnow pulled the billfold out and produced the prescription and the quarters. He held the prescription in his hand. It slipped from his fingers and Dr. Crow shot his other hand out, snatching it from the air. He put the cigarette in his mouth and unfolded the sheet.

Minnow held the quarters out in the palm of his hand.

"I have this. It's for the medicine. Please." He looked at the shelf behind Dr. Crow. The vials and canisters did not look like the ones in Ander's. Some seemed handmade: leather pouches clasped with snaps, little glass jars pasted with faded brown labels. Cans half-rusted. One had a label of a knight and said "St. John The Conqueror." Scented tapers, burned stubs, candles cased in tall glasses. Little clay shapes and lumps of stone sat in lines.

"Do you have it?"

Dr. Crow took a final pull from the cigarette and dropped it on the dirt floor. He stepped on it with his shoe. He nodded.

"I don't want your money."

"It's as good as any."

Dr. Crow looked up from the prescription. He refolded it without looking down again and set the paper next to him on the low table.

"Have a seat, boy," he said, and moved to the open door. He closed it and the place fell into darkness. Minnow did not move. A gull squawked outside and men made noises at the docks. Faded shapes showed as his eyes adjusted to the dim light from the crack overhead.

"Have a seat," he repeated.

Dr. Crow lit another match and the flame burned hot and bright for a moment, illuminating the room in gold. A mask hung on the wall, made of a horseshoe crab shell, painted in strange colors and patterns. Dr. Crow lit a candle and then pointed at the stool.

Minnow sat down and clasped his fingers tight around his coins.

Dr. Crow moved across the room to the cabinet and opened a drawer. He took out a stack of paper and then sat down in his chair. The wax melted on the candle and the wick burned brighter. Dr. Crow was still only a shadow, with the flickering light reflected in his purple glasses.

"You see this?" he asked, and held up the paper. Only it wasn't paper. It was money, in a loose bundle. Minnow swallowed and nodded.

"You seen this much?"

Minnow shook his head.

"It's more than your daddy makes in years."

Dr. Crow slipped a dollar from the stack and held it over the candle. The heat of the flame drafted the edge up and then it caught, burning a strange blue color in the dark room. Smoke peeled off as it burned, and the bill curled upward toward the steady, bony hand. Dr. Crow held it until only the smoldering edge remained, and then he let it drop to the floor. He put the stack of money on the low table and turned to Minnow.

"Now what you want to do with them quarters?"

"Please. I can give you the money and anything else I have. I can do anything you need."

Dr. Crow laughed again, the same laugh that started low and then rose into a sharp cackle that seemed sharper with the door closed.

"What can you do that I can't have done for me by someone who don't come without permission?"

Minnow sucked his bottom lip between his teeth and stared at the candle flames.

"I'm from town. I know it back and forth, sir. I know the Island too."

"Oh, you know the Island."

"I know some of it."

"You know some of it."

Minnow nodded.

"I fish out there. My father took me hunting near Frogmore once."

Dr. Crow tilted his head.

"Hunting for what?"

"Ducks. He got invited out once, to hunt. We had a good time."

Dr. Crow nodded.

"You been out there alone?"

Minnow shook his head.

"No sir. But I could go."

"You think so?"

"I came here on my own."

Dr. Crow's head turned just slightly toward the door.

"I know you did. And now you're alone."

"Please."

Dr. Crow leaned back and gestured at the shelves.

"I don't got what you need."

"What?" The word tasted sour in Minnow's mouth, like vomit.

"I don't got it. But I can get it. Real easy."

"Please." Minnow held out the coins. His eyes struggled, and he saw just two faded rings of silver in his palm. The candlelight showed Dr. Crow's features, but the man stayed still like a statue, one leg crossed over the other.

"You keep that for your quest. You gonna need it."

"Quest?"

"You gonna take a journey."

"To where?"

Dr. Crow stood up and took a jar from the shelf. He set it on the low table next to the candle. The yellow label had long faded away, and the jar was empty.

"You gonna bring me something."

"Sir?"

"You said you could do anything for me. Ain't that what you said?"

"Yessir."

"Then you gonna bring me something I can't get myself, by nature of what it is."

"I'll do anything."

Dr. Crow smiled and Minnow could not see his teeth because they were blackened with rot. "You ever hear of Sorry George?"

"No sir."

"Let me tell you about Sorry George, and you listen, and when I'm done you decide what you want to do. I can't tell you what to do, but I can tell you this."

Minnow nodded.

"Sorry George lived out past the Island. You know it goes way out, lots of islands, down to tiny hummocks that ain't really islands at all. Just a lump of sand grown up out of the mud, maybe without even one tree growing on it. Sorry George lived out there on one of those islands, and he was a lot like me. But he was different, too. They say Sorry George was the best root doctor ever worked. He was the great-grandson of a slave brought over in chains on a boat from Spain called Espiritu. That boat brought two hundred men, but his great-granddaddy was the only witch doctor among them. Warriors, kings, princes. But only one spirit man. So his great granddaddy passed his mantle down to his granddaddy, and then his granddaddy to his daddy, and then his daddy to him.

"So Sorry George practiced out there on them little islands, way out there, and people came from all over to get his help. Only he didn't make all his money helping. Plenty of doctors was helping. But he would do the hurting, too. He made most of it with black magic. Bad stuff. He make a root that could kill you dead, or kill someone you want dead. He could break up your marriage, or make your neighbor's cow get skinny and rot away while it's still alive. He was a powerful man, and he was called Dr. Shrike, 'cause a shrike is a bird that will nail something to a thorn to kill it before it eats it.

"One day a man comes looking for Dr. Shrike for a reason lots of men did. His woman was messing around on him. She was with lots of different men, all over the islands. Now normally Dr. Shrike would maybe make the woman sick, maybe give her burning inside, or maybe break her heart with a potion and make her never want to mess around again. But not this time.

"No one knows why this time was different. Maybe that man had a lot of money. Maybe that man was someone important. But Dr. Shrike did up a root that spread not just to one guilty man, but to all of them. Dr. Shrike could kill a man, I told you, but this time he killed fifty-two. No less than fifty-two men came down with the fever, and they died in their fields or their beds that very same day. Their bodies shriveled up where they fell, and their eyes turned blood red. Each one of them coughed up some bloody thing, like a little thing that might have been alive once. A piece of them. Every one of them died, but the woman lived.

"Fifty-two men were dead. Somebody's brother, somebody's cousin. Maybe their daddy or their granddaddy, even. If you weren't related to one of them, maybe he was your carpenter, or your bricklayer, or your field hand. Everyone on the islands knew one of them or more. Even the white folks. Wasn't a person didn't feel it when those men died, whether in their heart or in their wallets. Families fell apart. Businesses shut down. Whole villages were put into a dire way. They just stick huts out in the woods now, empty but for ghosts, maybe.

"People asked. People found out. It wasn't no secret who the most powerful root doctor on the islands was. They found out Dr. Shrike did it, but they couldn't do nothing about it. No way to prove it—and if there was, no one was brave enough to stand up to a man like that. Dr. Shrike got a new name, though. They called him by his real name, now, trying to take his power away. And they called him Sorry, for what he done to the people on those islands. Because of all the people he ever cursed and all the lives he ruined and all the evil he did. And people cursed him and hated him.

"Sorry George got old and no one ever got to him. People were too scared even when he was old—even other root doctors. He kept practicing until he was shriveled and old like I am now. I was just a boy when he died, but I knew of him. He died of natural causes, after all that. They buried him way out on one of them little islands where he was from. No one knows just where they put him, but lots of people think they know. It's like a riddle to find out where."

Dr. Crow paused. Minnow drew a long dry breath in through his nostrils.

"And now we come to where you come to my shack looking for help. And I got something I can help you with. I can get what you need easy, but I can't get what I need easy. I don't leave this place. I go to Bay Street when I need something. Everything else comes to me, just like you did. I'm safe right here. I can't be safe out there on them islands, where there's still strong magic and bad ghosts."

The candle flame drew long in the still air, a slender unmoving almond of yellow light.

"What do you need me to do?"

"This jar was full once," Dr. Crow said, picking up the little glass container, then setting it down again. "I need it full."

Minnow squinted, but the writing on the label was far too faded and the words were spidery and looped.

"If you want your daddy's medicine you gonna bring me goofer dust."

"Goofer dust?"

"Graveyard dust."

"Dust?" Minnow asked.

"From a grave."

"You don't mean from the church down the road."

Dr. Crow smiled again.

"No I do not. You gonna bring me dirt from Sorry George's grave, and I'll get you the medicine."

"You said no one knows where he's buried."

Dr. Crow shook his head.

"No one who is telling. But you may find someone if you look just right. Ain't no one like you ever tried to find it."

"Who can I look for?"

"Way out on them islands. You'll find someone."

"I don't even know where to start."

"First you got to get there. People live out there like there ain't no world across the river. I ain't seen them for years, but they may know."

"Is there a name? A place to look? I can't possibly find just one person on all those islands."

"You say you know Frogmore."

"I've been there."

"You find Auntie Mae out there and you tell her who you working for. Tell her what you looking for, and she'll help you if she can. She don't know nothing about Sorry George, but she can maybe find you someone who does."

"I can't do this."

"It ain't gonna be easy."

"How can I find something that you've never found?"

"It ain't gonna be easy. But if you want to try, it's there for you to try."

Dr. Crow reached behind his shoulder without looking and brought a small leather pouch down from the shelf and handed it to Minnow. The empty pouch could be cinched closed with a thread of leather woven through its top edge.

"You fill that up and bring it back to me, and our deal is done. Your daddy will live. I guarantee it."

Minnow wanted to leave. He thought of his father and took the pouch. He put it in his pocket and nodded.

"It doesn't sound so hard. It's just a trip across the river."

Dr. Crow didn't move. Then he turned his head left, right.

"You gonna have trouble."

"Pardon?"

"A man as bad as Sorry George ain't gonna let you get out there easy. He gonna make it hard."

"But he's dead."

Dr. Crow laughed.

"Death don't stop a hoodoo man. He's gonna try and stop you like he stopped everyone else who come before you."

"How?"

Dr. Crow tilted his head down, and his dark glasses lost the candlelight. The world outside fell silent, and the shack might have been buried under a mile of earth.

"Only he would know. But I know what I would do. And I can tell you that three things gonna come at you. It may be something you know, or someone you know. It may be a stranger, or something you never seen before. I don't know what, but it's gonna be three things. Some of them are already on their way. Some of them may be already here. But it's gonna be three things."

Minnow shook his head.

"What can I do?"

"Do what everybody does. Look for it, and when you see it, face it straight on. Ain't no use in running. Here."

Dr. Crow turned around and looked at the shelf. All Minnow could see was shadows and the edges of innumerable glass vials. Crow picked a flat flask with a cork in the top. It was smaller than a playing card.

"Don't you open this, till you need it most."

"What is it?"

"A potion that will help against evils. Old evils who respond to such things."

"Thank you."

Minnow put the vial inside the leather pouch. He put it back in his pocket, next to Varn's arrowhead, and when he looked up Dr. Crow was standing. Crow was tall, his head lost in the darkness. His dry voice sounded far away, like a ghost speaking from deep within an ancient crypt.

"There ain't nothing left for you to know or do here. You got to get on your way."

Minnow nodded and stood up.

"Don't come back here if you don't have what I want. Understand?"

"Yessir."

"Then go."