Thrown-away Child

you—shame!” The congregation shouted thunderously.
    Shame! Shame! Shame!
    “And you—Hassie Pinkney! Snake woman!”
    “La, mercy! Mercy! Oh La, please!”
    “It was you, Hassie Pinkney—you killed me! To keep me from telling the truth I tell today!”
    Hassie fell to the floor, gasping and writhing, consumed by her guilt, which took the form of what Charity Hospital would later that Sunday morning diagnose as a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
    The naked man used his knife to cut a lock of hair from his head and then held it high over him, so all could see.
    “Today, I have destroyed the power of the imposter Zebediah Tilton, who was foolish enough to call me out. I tell you all now—shun him. Let earthly law have its way with him! This hair I hold is the most powerful gris-gris of all, hair from one gone to the beyond. I shall give it to one who lives amongst you—one of the very least of you. I shall plant it in his head this very night as he sleeps—and there it will grow. I shall give the power to a thrown-away child, now a grown man in my own image. That man is Perry Duclat.”
    And then, the naked man disappeared into the steaming pit below the altar.
    Four black policemen, led by Officer Claude Bougart, arrested Zebediah Tilton and read him his rights in accordance with the Miranda law. Janice Tilton and her crew from Channel 6 captured it all on film.

    Just before airtime, a visitor was shown to Janice Tilton’s cubicle in the WDSU newsroom. He had hobbled in from the corridor and now took a seat across from Janice.
    “You might know me,” he said. “My name’s Newcombe. I live in the cottage your mama and daddy used to own. Next door to Hassie Pinkney, gone to what she got coming.”
    “How can I help you?”
    “I got something I been keeping in trust for a long time. Don’t know just what it is, but I always had a bad feeling about it. Hassie, she give it to me.“
    “Let’s see it.”
    Newcombe reached into the breast pocket of his Sunday suit. He pulled out a flat cardboard box and gave it to Janice. “It’s a tape recording,” he said. “The old-fashioned kind, not one of them cassettes.“
    “What’s on it?”
    “Don’t know. Never wanted to hear it. I ain’t got a player anyhow.”
    “Wait here, Mr. Newcombe.”
    “I ain’t got nothing special to do.”
    Janice got up and took the tape reel to the editing room, where an engineer found a way to play a conversation preserved from way back in 1948.
    It was a short conversation. Short and to the point: Now Sister Hassie, we can’t be having hotheads around here like your neighbor Willis to ruin all our church plans. So I’m asking your help... What I got to do?... The man’s a believer in the message of serpents. See to it one of your snakes get to Willis sometime...
    Janice lay her head on a film cutting table and wept.
     

FORTY-SIX

     
    In the big house on St. Charles Boulevard, Alderman Hippocrates Beauregard Giradoux awoke in his bed from a fevered sleep. Someone seemed to be calling his name from the sunlit doorway, a woman with a voice that confused him, a voice at once flirtatious and bitter. The drugs he had taken the night before—a fistful of antihistamines, three Klonopin tranquilizers, a Tylenol number 4 —had failed to prevent a replay of the past few nights’ disturbing vision: a man trying desperately to outrun falling stone slabs taller than himself, unable to lift his feet from a quicksand of broken bodies...
    This strange-sounding woman, maybe it was only one more nightmare.
    “Hippo?”
    He raised his head and saw her in the doorway. She glided toward him across the door, her naked body eclipsing the light. He tried to move but could not.
    “Hippocrates, my love... Hippocrates!”
    Now he tried to call out, but his tongue only made dopy noises. She kept floating toward him over the floor, so it appeared, and as she did her voice grew rough and aged and mocking. “Hippocrates, my love,” she cawed. “My love... Hah!”
    When he felt hot breath in his face—breath that smelled old, like dried moss on a dead log—he knew the woman was no dream. He knew he was powerless to make her go away by rubbing his eyes, even if he could lift his hands from his sides.
    She was now at his canopied bed. His head flopped sideways. He saw the blur of an old woman vaulting from the floor, her witch’s figure leaping astride his prone body, her bony legs straddling his corpulent chest. His eyes were tightly