Interfictions 2 (16 page)

[I have since discovered that doves are used all the time in Santeria rituals. So much for logic.]

But nobody liked pigeons.

Nobody, that is, except for Handcock's resident crazy lady, whom we affectionately called Miss Pigeon. And even she only liked to eat them.

Miss Pigeon was the most efficient can collector in town. Her shopping cart bulged with can-stuffed garbage bags so full, they made that homely cart look like a steampunk flying machine. She had further customized the cart, housing it with what looked like a pantry cupboard that had been ripped out of some country-kitsch kitchen. In it—all the kids in town had been dared at one time or another to sneak a peek—she kept a small electric deep-fryer; some staples, like corn oil and Veg-All and potted meat; extra yellow kitchen gloves (she always wore a pair, which made her look kind of like a superhero); a huge jug of Clorox; a lunchbox, square and gray; and a Cabbage Patch doll so mangled someone should've called Children's Services to put it in foster care. For her lunch she always went to the park that surrounded City Hall, where she would douse a park bench with Clorox, take a seat, and, still wearing her kitchen gloves, daintily pick at what looked like deep-fried chicken, but what any local would tell you was deep-fried pigeon.

Everybody in Handcock, CT, had received an involuntary education on how to catch, prepare, and eat a pigeon. Most members of polite society would pretend to avert their eyes, but even the most squeamish among us would pause to watch her nab one. She was a master. Her favorite hunting ground was the park, where stood the remains of a wall where, it is said, generals Washington and Rochambeau debated the merits of attacking the English in New York. Pigeons had since “whitewashed” that wall with their droppings. Miss Pigeon'd sidle up to the wall, where the birds stood packed together like targets at a shooting gallery. They'd hop and flap and caper in pigeony fashion as she approached, delighted to see her. She would lean against the wall, wait for just a second or two, and, in one elegant motion, swipe at the wall with her Grendel-like arm, dragging whatever she caught into a sack she kept just for that purpose. Sometimes she'd catch two; most of the time she got one; every once in a while she missed. Whatever the result, afterwards she threw some bits of bread at the pigeons. They exploded into an ecstatic battle for those crusts. Then she slung the rice sack over her shoulder and headed back to her cart.

Nobody talked to her, interacted with her, or, by the way, tried to stop her. We just watched from a distance and tittered and judged. So imagine her surprise when one day, a ten-year-old boy who didn't quite look all-the-way American came up to her and asked, “What's your name?"

She stopped dead. She looked at him as if through a fog. She squinted, cogitated. And then she said, “Maggie."

"Thank you,” said the little boy. Miss Pigeon immediately turned back to her cart and started pushing. The little boy ran home. He was happy. Excited. He now had the last ingredient he needed for his ebo. One that would compel Miss Pigeon to help him. One he made up himself, though it was based on many others he had read. “An Ebo to Make Someone Help You,” he would call it. He wondered if it would end up in a book someday.

An Ebo to Make Someone Help You

One iron nail

One coconut

Black, red, and yellow ribbon

Rum (aguardiente is preferred, but if you live in

Connecticut, rum will do)

Wash the coconut with a sponge dipped in rum, asking Elegua to assist you. Heat a nail over a flame (a gas stovetop works perfectly). Drive it into the coconut, then yank it out. Pour some rum into the small hole (but not so much that your Papi will notice you stole his rum). Tie black, red, and yellow ribbons to the nail. Push it back into the same hole in the coconut you made before. As you do, repeat seven times the name of the person you want to help you. Sleep with the coconut in your arms that night. The person will be willing to help you the following day.

Miss Pigeon—Maggie—didn't recognize me the following day. I caught up with her as she approached the pigeon wall, yelling “Miss Maggie, Miss Maggie!” She slowly turned around and stared at me, squinting and straining her memory to figure out how this little boy had come to know her name. “Hello?” she said cautiously.

"Hello, Miss Maggie. I'm the little boy from yesterday."

"I don't remember anything,” she said.

"That's okay."

She laughed. “Says you."

I held out an empty hundred-pound rice sack. (Papi always had some lying around.) “I was hoping you would do me a favor."

She stared at the rice sack and said nothing.

"I was hoping you would catch a pigeon for me."

Instantly she said, “Okay."

"Thank you. It means a lot."

"Okay."

We stood there looking at each other. Stood. There. Looking.

I said, “So, should we go now?"

"Okay,” said Miss Pigeon, and took the rice sack out of my hand. She trundled over to the wall, took her customary place. The pigeons danced for her. She threw her patented left hook and swept one into my bag; the pigeon pecked ineffectually at her yellow kitchen glove as it went in. For a few seconds it looked like grenades were going off in the rice sack, but soon the pigeon stopped rioting. Miss Pigeon took a crust of bread out of a pocket and threw it to the other pigeons on the wall, who fell upon it in a catastrophe of wings. Then she trundled back over to me, the sack held before in modest triumph.

"Here you go,” she said, handing me the sack. After a second, she added, “You gonna eat it?"

The pigeon came to life again in the bag, but I held on firmly. “Yes. Santeros always eat their sacrifices, unless they're using it to remove a curse or an evil spirit from themselves. Then they can't eat them. But most of the time they do."

She understood nothing of what I had said, I could plainly see. Still, she said, “If you're going to eat it, make sure you deep-fry it."

"Why?"

"Because pigeons are filthy. Full of lice and disease. You got to kill the germs, okay?"

"Okay,” I said. After a moment's thought, I asked, “Miss Maggie, if pigeons are so gross, why do you eat them?"

"'Cause they're free, okay? That's a whole wall of free food over there. And they taste good, once you kill the germs.” Then she gave me a look that I think was meant to be motherly and said, “You're a boy. You're young. You want me to kill the pigeon for you, okay?"

"No thank you, ma'am,” I said. “I have to perform the sacrifice myself, or Elegua won't help me."

Though again she didn't understand me, she said, “You're a good boy, okay? Remember to kill the germs.” Without another word she turned and headed back to the wall to catch herself tomorrow's lunch. The pigeons cavorted with joy.

On some of the points along the
X
axis of time, at least a few of the Salvadors, marching beside me on my right and left like my reflection in a pair of opposed mirrors, must have felt a little trepidation about killing the pigeon I had in the bag. But not this Salvador. I was excited. My test ebo had worked perfectly: Miss Pigeon agreed to help me so quickly that she must have been enchanted. And that meant, even though I had no idea what I was doing, even though I had never been initiated into Santeria, the gods were on my side. They wanted to help me, had accepted the ebo I had made up on my own. Maybe Mami, my main eggun, had helped convince them. And that led to one evitable conclusion: if the gods and my mom were willing to help me, that meant they thought I was on the right track.

Papi was almost always home: except that day, he was running an SAT-prep seminar at Samuel Adams after school. This was my one chance to kill, eviscerate, cook, eat, and dispose of the pigeon without Papi ever knowing. I had even bookmarked a recipe for deep-frying a pigeon in
The Joy of Cooking
. (Actually, it was a recipe for squab, but close enough: I wasn't eating it to delight my palette.) Papi had the 1962 edition, which begins with an epigram from Goethe's
Faust
that reads: “That which thy fathers have bequeathed to thee, earn it anew if thou wouldst possess it.” Yet another clear sign from the gods.

All the way home, the pigeon insisted on reminding me it was alive. It batted its wings and tossed itself around the bag and, during periods of rest, cooed plaintively. I didn't feel bad for it, exactly. But all the way home I wondered if its primitive bird brain had figured out it was going to die. That would be just like Elegua, trickster that he was—to whisper into the pigeon's ear the fate that was about to befall it, inspire fear in it, make my job that much harder.

I opened the front door, shed my bookbag in the entranceway, and trotted, the rice sack still struggling for its freedom, to the kitchen. I switched the sack to my left hand and got to work: emptied the sink of the breakfast cereal bowls; brought out the cutting board; took out Papi's Cutco French Chef knife; decided it was too small and went to the garage and got his machete; slowly, one-handedly, washed the machete in the sink; got a bowl for the blood and the entrails and the heart; another, bigger one for the feathers. Okay. Everything was ready.

Now then. How to get the bird out of the sack. Hadn't thought of that.

Suddenly I was terrified that it would fly out of the bag and perch somewhere where I wouldn't be able to get it. Papi would come home and hear the pigeon cooing and then look up and see the pigeon and it was obviously my fault that it was there and how would I explain it?

I gripped the sack in both hands. With all my strength I heaved it in the air and brought it crashing to the floor. The pigeon cried, flapped, fought for its life. I heaved it again. Again. Four, five, six times. It stopped fighting after the third, crying after the fifth. I had to be sure. Seven. Eight. Nine.

Ten.

I bent over, huffing. I hadn't noticed I'd started crying. I wanted to wipe the tears off my face, but I was afraid to release my two-handed chokehold on the neck of the sack. So I just let them fall. They beaded on the rice sack before scurrying off.

I looked at the kitchen clock—it was one of those weirdo Kit-Kat clocks with the moving eyes and tail—and watched it for two full minutes. All the while I listened. No sound came from the sack. No movement.

Slowly, cautiously, I grabbed the lips of the sack and opened its mouth a little, ready to squeeze it shut if the bird tried to escape, and peered in.

The pigeon blinked. It was alive. But it lay crumpled at the bottom of the sack. Awkwardly angled: living Cubism. I'd broken the one wing I could see and a lot of bones I couldn't. Blood pooled behind its blinking eye.

"I'm sorry,” I said. I opened the sack as wide as it could go. “I'm sorry,” I said, and cautiously reached into the bag. The bird seemed to watch me, but I thought with all the blood filling its eye it was probably blind. “I'm sorry,” I said, and gently grasped the pigeon in both my hands. It should not have felt that soft, that cartilaginous. It did not resist. I lifted it up; the head swung loosely on its shoulder. It opened its beak in surrender, but then, slowly, willfully, closed it. “I'm sorry,” I said, and carried it to the sink.

I placed it in the sink on its side as gently as I could. There was no risk of its flying away now. I put the bowl for the blood and innards in the sink next to it, brought the feather bowl a little closer to my work area. Guess I wouldn't need the cutting board after all. Or the machete.

I took a breath.
It's okay
, I thought.
Just stay calm and work fast
.

I clutched the knife in my right hand, held the pigeon steady in my left. Should I cut off its head first, put it out of its misery? I was afraid I would do it wrong, that I would cut indecisively and have to hack at the neck, torturing the bird even more. I was desperate to kill it mercifully, quickly. With my left hand I lifted its useless wing. With my right I guided the knifepoint to where I thought its heart was. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I honor your sacrifice. Thank you.” Then as hard as I could I pushed the knife all the way through the bird. My brain burst into a swarm of bees. The knifepoint gouged the sink's porcelain.

The front door opened. Papi. Home early. The pigeon lay dead in the sink, transfixed by the knife still in my hand. I looked around wildly, sought any means of escape, but it was as if my fingers were glued to the knife. I couldn't let go.

Wait. No. I could let go. I just didn't want to. I wanted to be punished for what I had done. I took a breath and faced the kitchen's swinging doors.

Mami shouldered her way into the kitchen, struggling with three paper bags overflowing with groceries. She couldn't see me over the bags. “Sal, I'm home!” she yelled, loud enough for me to hear her in any room of the house. In English.

"Hi Mami?” I asked.

"Oh! Jou're in here?” She laughed.
"?Bueno, no te queda parado c?mo un bobo!
Come hel' jour Mami with these bags.” But she was already putting them down on the kitchen table. “?Tonigh' we're goin' to have a feas'! I goin' to ma'e jour favorite.
?Boliche!
I was at the estore, and I saw ...
?Qu? te pasa?
"

She stopped dead, stared at me, her eyes following my arm, to the hand, to the knife grip. I stared back. Then I started to cry.

"
?Qu? te pasa?
” she repeated, terrified, running over. She looked in the sink.

Covered her mouth. Screamed into her hands.

"?Qu? hiciste
, Sal?” She yelled. She started crying, too.
"Bendito sea Dios. ?Qu? hiciste?"

I started to respond through my bawling, but Mami slapped me. I instantly tasted blood, stopped crying. She slapped me again.
"?Dime que diablera hiciste aqu?!"

Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten Mami was a hitter. She took off a sneaker and proceeded to give me the walloping of my life.

It was the happiest moment of my childhood.

When Mami disappeared again, slipped off the tightrope of my
Y
time and tumbled into another, I knew I had to look for conclusive evidence to prove to Papi she had returned. And of course I found none: time retroactively righted itself the moment she vanished. The only thing it left were the marks she left on me. Shoe welts on my back and legs. The cut she slapped into my lip.