For most of my early life I didn't realize that my dreams were not like those of normal people. I thought that when people dreamt they saw colors, felt textures and experienced an alternate existence almost as real as that of their waking life. It was only when my father, Remy LaFontaine, began training me to concoct dream potions and cast dream jinxes that I became interested enough in the topic to borrow a psychology primer from the school library. The chapter on human dreaming was a revelation. Most people had no sense of touch or smell in dreams? Some rarely dreamt in color? And the content of their dreams – vague, disjointed events that upon waking vanished like mist on the water? By comparison my dreams were a study in order and precision. Each was a little play, some from my past, some depicting things that might have been, and a few portraying events that might yet come to be.
With increasing frustration I had flipped the psychology text from page to page looking for explanations of dreams like those that I experienced. Eventually, I realized that I was different from "normal" people in many fundamental ways. During my years on the run, living out of flea-bag hotels and squatting in abandoned buildings, I would pass the dreary, solitary hours by reading books I had picked up at garage sales and a swap meets. Often my studies were little more than an attempt to understand myself. It's a work in progress.
The logical part of my mind told me that the herbs and infusions, the teas and potions that my father and mother had both imbibed before and after I was conceived had altered me in some fundamental way, cracked the chains of my DNA and warped my glands until my own peculiar hormonal soup was contaminated beyond repair. But then I thought about my brother, Zion, whose name my father claimed was ordained in a vision from the Spirit Gael, and I wondered if hoodoo and magic, demons, spirits and spells might have some reality of their own.
My father, a light-skinned Redbone named Remy LaFontaine, claimed to be the seventh son of a seventh son. My mother, Malina Elise, a coal-black beauty with a Caribbean accent and murky past, told various stories of her history. In some she was a hoodoo priestess from Jamaica; in others her home had been someplace between Bimini and St. Barts, Trinidad and the Caicos.
I often had visions, the extreme ones I called 'spells.' Perhaps a psychiatrist would label them 'visual hallucinations' but I didn't think that was correct. I am not psychotic or schizophrenic. Sometimes, more and more often of late, I just see on the outside more of what people are on the inside, their cruelty or passion warping their faces, their emotions haloing their heads like a colored fog. It's disturbing but often useful in my business. As I said, both a gift and a curse. Is all that from the hoodoo herbs, potions and infusions? Perhaps as the first born son of parents like Remy and Malina it was inevitable that I would be irretrievably different from what I came to think of as "normal" people.
Or maybe the real explanation for my peculiarities is a little of both. Despite the persona I struggled to present to the world, I knew that I wasn't really human, but something different, a fake human, a changeling, someone who always needed to be in disguise lest the normals discover my true nature and cage me like some animal in a zoo. As I slept under the combined effects of high voltage electricity and an ether-soaked rag, I dreamed.
I was back in the cabin near the banks of Pig Run Creek, a tiny stream that meandered west until it joined the Sabine River near the Texas border. A boy again, I awoke in my narrow bed to the calls of the jays and woodpeckers and the croaking of the big frogs. Crisp dawn light peeked through the cracks in the plank walls and by its color and the smell of pine trees and slow-flowing water I knew that I was dreaming, but it was a dream that I could no more ignore than I could disregard a tiger leaping for my throat.
I threw off the covers and pulled on clean underwear, jeans and a black t-shirt. I felt the laces tighten my sneakers across my feet. I knew this dream by heart. I knew that this was the day that had shattered my life and that I was powerless to change a single instant of it.
I tiptoed to my parents' bedroom and found my mother awake, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. My father was gone. He had left after dinner, off to spend the night with the fat women.
"It's time," I said and crawled beneath the bed. The floorboard squeaked as it pulled away. I removed the worn Romeo amp; Julieta cigar box from its hiding place and slithered out from beneath the bed frame. My mother stood there, her eyes blank, her face more like black plastic than human skin. She was wearing her blue dress and black shoes. Her hair was contained beneath a burgundy turban, making her look more like an African tribes' woman than a resident of Beauregard Parish, Louisiana. I remembered what my mother had really looked like that day, the excitement and fear that had laced her face, but in this dream she displayed only abject acceptance of her fate, as if the dream-woman knew what would happen next as well as I did and how it all would end.
I shoved two bundles of greasy bills into my pockets and grabbed my mother's flaccid hand. In this terrible dream it was the doughy hand of the walking dead. Silently we slipped past Zion's room and out onto the porch, what the locals called a gallery. The planks creaked beneath our feet as I led her down the steps and onto the path to the highway. I checked my watch. In ten minutes the bus would be passing the trail-head on its way down Highway 190 to Baton Rouge.
Beams slipped between the branches of the gum trees and the loblolly pines and dappled the ground. Where the grass was worn away patches of red earth glowed in the morning light. We were barely a hundred yards from the highway when, as if by magic, my father, Remy, appeared on the trail ahead of us. Tall and thin, his skin the color of pale rust, he stood with legs wide apart, blocking our way.
"Where you goin', Boy?"
I tried to push my mother behind me, as I always did in this dream, but somehow she got past me.
"I be leavin' you, Remy. I be takin' my son wit me."
"The boy can go, if he wants. You, wife, you stay here with me."
"I got a broomstick. I be jumping over it. Wife no more."
"You not my wife no more?" Remy asked, grinning.
"You on your own."
"What about Zion?"
"He be your son. You do wit him like you want."
"You're right. Zion is my son. How do you think I knew what you were up to? Zion hear you planning this with Rafe."
"He don't hear nuthin'."
Remy smiled. "Not with his ears. He hear it in his head, in his dreams. I know what Rafe there's got in his pockets." Remy pulled out a knife. "So, woman, you my wife or you just some thief stealin' my money?"
"My money too."
Remy raised the blade. "Wife or not?"
"Wife to you no more."
Fast as a snake Remy leaped forward and plunged the blade into her stomach. Her mouth opened in an "O" and blood tricked through her grasping hands.
"Like you say, wife no more." Remy's lips split into an evil smile and he raised the blade for a stroke into her heart. I watched my own hand as it pulled a cue-ball sized rock from the mud, watched as I leapt forward and threw it straight at Remy's face, but at the last instant he turned and the stone caught him in the side of his head. It made a crunching sound, like the snap when a hammer splits a pecan shell. Remy gave me a surprised, disbelieving glance then fell forward almost at my feet.
I watched in remembered horror as my mother's knees buckled.
"Mama," I cried, reaching for her but she feebly pulled away.
"Run," she whispered.
"I'll get the doctor."
"Run, he's coming."
Though the trail to the cabin was screened by foliage, I knew that my brother, Zion, gun in hand, was racing toward us. I looked back at my mother who gave me one brief smile, then tumbled forward, face down. From the direction of the cabin I heard a branch being slapped out of the way. Without conscious thought I grabbed the bloody rock and dropped it next to my mother's outstretched hand, then fled. I reached the highway just as the bus wheezed around the turn at the top of the grade. I pulled two wrinkled bills from my father's bundle and waved them at the driver. For a moment I wondered if the old man would stop for a Redbone kid like me but the only color he cared about was green.
I jumped aboard, gave the pale old man the bills and crouched in a seat at the back of the bus. I peeked out the window until the we rounded the next bend but Zion did not appear. Off and on, all the way to Baton Rouge, I checked the highway for the red lights of the Sheriff's cruiser but, unmolested, the bus pulled into town on time. I tore my gaze from the windows. As I looked down the aisle toward the front door, the light dimmed, then disappeared and then, cold and damp and lying in patch of weeds, I woke up just as the last sliver of moon slid from the sky.
My head throbbed and the stink of ether and manure hung in the air. I struggled to sit up and found myself sprawled in the grass. I ran my palms across my chest and thighs but I didn't feel the sticky wetness of leaking blood. My back throbbed and the rest of my body joined in with a chorus of aches but as far as I could tell, nothing was broken. After a couple of deep breaths I struggled to my feet and slowly made a three-sixty turn. To my right was a hint of a line of trees. To my left I caught a glimpse of a slightly lighter charcoal streak. I slapped my pockets but my wallet, keys, pen-knife and cell phone were all gone. I shoved my fingers inside my right sock and felt the edge of my emergency hundred dollar bill. Shakily, I tramped across the pasture toward the deserted two-lane.
A mile down the highway I spotted a farm house with a light burning above the door. I pounded on the framing off and on for half a minute before a sleepy voice called, "Who's there?"
"My car broke down. I need to call a friend to pick me up."
"You know what time it is?" the man called back without opening the door.
"My friend won't mind. I'll give you the number. You call him and he'll pay you twenty dollars when he gets here."
"What if he don't come or he comes and he don't pay?"
The door opened a crack and a slice of a weathered face topped by one blue eye peered out. I held up the hundred dollar bill.
"I'll leave this with you as security. If my friend doesn't pay, you can keep it."
The eye warily regarded the c-note.
"Where do you want to go?"
"Back into town, Baltimore."
The door opened a bid wider. The man's head was topped by a wild thatch of white hair, his face seamed, his cheeks covered with patches of gray stubble.
"That all you got?"
"I've got another hundred in my apartment."
"Two hundred?"
"Two hundred."
"I'll get my coat."
The old man led me to a battered Ford F150 whose doors groaned like men in pain.
"I'll take that hundred now," the farmer said, leaving the keys in his pocket.
"When we clear your driveway."
The old man cackled, and pulled out his keys.
"Good for you. I like a man with a head on his shoulders."
When we reached the highway, I wordlessly handed over the bill. The old man laughed and shoved it into his pocket.
I kept an emergency key hidden under a rock at the edge of the parking lot and led the old man, Roger something, inside where I gave him the promised second payment.
"Whoohoo," Roger said happily. "Two hundred bucks! Not bad for an old man who can't sleep nights anyway."
"Thanks for your help."
"Hell, son, for this kind of money, you can call me any time you need a damn taxi driver."
Cackling happily Roger limped down the stairs. I didn't pay any attention. I figured I didn't have any time to spare. Racing through the apartment I grabbed a couple more bills, Carolyn Simpson's address, a six inch kitchen knife and my spare set of keys.
"Pretty girl." a voice screeched from the corner of the darkened room.
"Go back to sleep, Shantrell."
"Pretty girl!" she squawked, louder this time.
I grabbed a handful of sunflower seeds from a jar next to the TV and dropped them in Shantrell's dish. The African Blue parrot appraised me with a quizzical eye, then dipped her beak into the bowl. Idly, I brushed her wing with the backs of my fingers, then hurried for the door. My attackers had been waiting for me in the parking lot which meant somebody knew I was going out tonight. Somebody wanted me out of the way. It was a good bet that somebody didn't want me meeting Carolyn Simpson. Her stalker was a cop. He'd have access to a Taser.
Had the lawyer tipped him off? Had Simpson herself let something slip? Cell calls were pretty easy to capture and decoding them was a joke if you knew what you were doing, like maybe a cop would. Had Manchuko set up an intercept on her phone? If he was serious enough to do that and have a couple of his friends kidnap me, what the hell did he have planned for Carolyn Simpson?
I raced down the stairs.
Here is an excerpt from David Grace's novel:
The Forbidden List