Flesh of My Flesh

“Are you sure you don’t want to check it out?” Vince said. He had regaled me with a tall tale of a lakeside field where giant coppertops and dickheads grew in thick clusters as far as the eye could see. More mushrooms than you could carry. Eerie jungle music emanated from a dense forest nearby. He had to hightail it when he caught sight of a pickup heading his way from the opposite shore of the lake.

“I’ve got the backpack,” he continued. “You don’t have to carry any of the shrooms, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

I slowed the Lincoln to the four way stop and hooked a left on Boyette. “It’s not just that,” I said, “I can’t get popped for anything. Not trespassing. Nothing.”

I was graduating next summer and would be looking for a teaching job. Vince was still slinging herb for a living. He was on felony probation for possession of LSD. He had eaten all but a small strip of the sheet as the pigs closed in and got off without prison time. He’d been blissfully carefree ever since that interminable trip.

“I’m down for tripping,” I said, “but I don’t want to run the risk of—”

“Relax,” he said mildly, “no one’s getting busted for anything tonight.” He slid two Camels from the pack perched on the dash, sparked one with his lucky Zippo and passed the other my way.

I lit the cigarette and cranked down the window. What I left unsaid was that I really did want to see what he had described. If we were only sixteen again, I thought, I’d be right there with him. Vince had a penchant for hyperbole, but there was something in the glimmer of his eyes. Something novel and uncanny. Something I couldn’t put my finger on.

“What do you mean by weird jungle music,” I said, “like breakbeat or darkcore?”

“No, nothing like that,” he said, tucking his black Eddie Furlongesque locks tightly behind his ears. “It was like the soundtrack of a river in the Amazon. And there was this humming, this droning vibration.”

He snuffed out the cig in the ash tray and thrust a finger out the window. “There’s a dirt road just past this orange grove. Pull in there.”

The road, if you could call it that, was nearly too narrow for my Town Car. It was sized more for a horse drawn carriage than an automobile. I worked slowly over potholes, hemmed in by trees and unable to deviate even inches to the left or right. We eventually emerged into a small clearing bordered by a cattle fence and chain locked metal gate. A dilapidated oblong structure sat on a hill in the distance ringed in concertina wire.

We crawled to a stop. “What the hell is that?” I said, cutting the engine. Hills were a rarity in this part of Florida. The scale of this one suggested human construction, either in modern times or by native inhabitants centuries ago.

“That, my friend,” he said, cocking one eyebrow, “is the old Satanic church. Or the burned-out husk of it at least.”

“Old Satanic church,” I chuckled, “that’s a good one.”

“I had the same reaction when Corey told me,” he said evenly. Vince had visited his older brother at the state hospital in Chattahoochee last week. “He swears there was a goat skull mounted on the arch above the front doors. In his telling it wasn’t burned out or barb wired.”

“If that’s true, why didn’t you say anything until now?” I wondered if he’d been pulling my leg about everything else. Isn’t an old Satanic church something you would mention?

“Maybe because you would have thought I was bat shit crazy, like . . .” he trailed off, not wanting to compare himself to his brother. “Listen,” he murmured, just above a whisper,” I’m not sure what to think, but it’s probably better not to speak too much of such a place.”

“How long will this take?” I regretted driving in here. If a cop or anyone else turned in, I wouldn’t be able to get out.

“Thirty minutes tops, man. I got this.”

Vince hopped out, hurtled over the fence and bolted ahead, clinching his JNCOs above the stomp of his Doc Martens through the boggy field. He shrank into the golden sliver of sunset flaring from the base of the hill and the edge of the grove.

I puffed another smoke, and as I perused the Sunday funnies in the St. Petersburg Times, a few of the more lurid covers of Jack Chick’s Satanic panic comics flashed through my mind’s eye. Recalling those fraught warnings in church that Dungeons & Dragons was a tool of the devil, I couldn’t help laughing. Was Vince that naïve? This was evangelical paranoia all over again. And that’s where Corey’s story had to have come from, Florida in the Eighties and a rush to believe your local new agers and Wiccans were Lucifer worshipping child molesters.

The police were what concerned me, not whatever that blasted building had once been. I scanned the rearview mirror for the umpteenth time and glanced down at my watch. What the hell was taking him so long? It was going on forty-five minutes and the mosquitoes were out in full force. I rolled up the windows, flipped the key in the ignition and popped in Autechre’s new album, Tri Repetae. With the seat reclined, I took in the dusk clad figure of the hill. It loomed larger in the half-light, a gloved fist thrust against the pink glow of the horizon.

I was resting my eyes for just a moment when . . . tap, tap, tap, I jerked upright and saw him, the sheriff rapping the tip of his nightstick on my driver-side window.

I switched off the stereo dial with one hand and was reaching for the window crank with the other when the cop yanked the door open.

“What the hell was you listening to, boy,” he snarled. “Sounds like a goddamn machine on the shitter.”

“That was Autechre,” I said slowly, resisting the urge to fidget my hands or say anything else.

He slung an arm over the door and leaned in toward me, for a long time saying nothing, his chrome shades veiling the focus of his eyes. The hint of a smirk played at the leathery creases of his jowls.

I was staring down at the wheel, trying not to startle when he finally drawled, “License and registration.”

Standing between the opened door and myself with his groin all too close and angled uncomfortably at my head, he took his sweet time examining my documents on the roof of the car. Where had he come from? There wasn’t a cruiser in sight, and he hadn’t walked up the road I came in on. I’d closed my eyes for the briefest of moments and would have seen him approaching in the rearview.

“Black Knight Drive,” he murmured, tipping his head down and unceremoniously dropping what I had handed him in my lap. “I had a cousin who grew up out that way. Lived in a two-story on King Arthur Court.”

“We’re further up,” I said,” about a block from Seffner Valrico.”

“Is that right,” he smiled. He stood there stroking the gray stubble of his chin as another ungainly silence came and went.

“And who is we, boy, who you live there with?”

“My folks,” I quipped, “my mom and pop,” since why does it matter and none of your fucking business went without saying.

“And do you pay them rent,” he deadpanned, his shit-eating grin vanishing like a sun shower, “or are you freeloadin’ like you’re doin’ on this here land?”

“I’m sorry, officer. I got lost. I took a wrong turn. I was just about to—”

He slammed the door so hard I thought it would bounce off its hinges. He gripped the wheel, stooping down and bringing his head within inches of my face.

“Cut the shit, boy. I seen you sitting here. Gimme one of them smokes.”

I obliged, handing over the cigs and my lighter, which he let slip through his fingers and fall to the ground.

“Thanks for the light, but I got my own.” Over the roof of the car, in earshot but out of sight, he struck what sounded like a Zippo.

“You must think you can come bargin’ in on land that ain’t yours and no one’s gonna’ pay for it. I’m here to assure you,” he advised, ashing in my lap, “you are sorely mistaken. But since you gave me a smoke, I’m in a charitable mood. I’m gonna’ let you drive out of here. Next time won’t be a freebie.”

With that, he flicked the cigarette against my cheek, and before the shrapnel of cherry could ricochet from seat to floor, he had grabbed the nightstick from his belt and smashed it in a spinning wallop against the rearview mirror.

“Better get that mirror fixed. Now go on, get,” he growled. I shifted into reverse, slowly backed up and made my way out.

Sleep didn’t come easy that night. I tossed and turned through the wee hours, paging Vince’s beeper hourly as if mere repetition would magically summon his phone call. I wanted to believe he had indulged the urge to pop a few caps straight from the cow patties. Crazy fucker would really do it. Gobsmacked, he had wandered off across the acres, forgetting all about me and everything else in the known universe.

Finally drifting off after sunrise, the screen behind my eyelids displayed Vince behind some farmer’s barn, lying on his back at the base of a tree. I rolled over in bed, crawling on my belly through the dew slicked grass, but as I loomed closer, he had coalesced into a cloud of mist. I lay where he had lain, alone. A thick fog blasted through the branches of the tree. Slats of barn exploded outward, one narrowly missing my face. Through the blown-out wall a stream of parchment billowed from a Bible. I reached up, tried to pluck one from the air. Rushing past my fingertips, Psalm 127 uncoiled its scroll, sounding on the harried tendrils of the wind: “Unless the Lord builds the—”

An alarm blared with the urgency of a siren. It wailed a second time, a third time, a fourth. I jerked up in bed, snatched the receiver from the nightstand.

“Vince, where are you! Dude, I was —”

“This is a test,” the monotone voice droned, “of the emergency broadcast syst—” I slammed the receiver down, cursed and cupped my head in my hands.

Vince wasn’t going to answer my pages, I was sure of it. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever again. He wasn’t going to be found at Orient Road jail, his mom’s house, his girlfriend’s house, the skatepark, the Bro Bowl, or anywhere else he would usually be on a Saturday, but that didn’t stop me from spending a fruitless day searching for him.

That evening, mom turned in early as usual, attending to her nightly knitting and reading. Dad stayed up watching M*A*S*H* reruns until just before midnight. After I saw the kitchen light blink out under the hallway door, I slipped out my bedroom window. I was old enough and, in recent years, responsible enough that my parents didn’t bother me about the occasional late-night outing, especially on a weekend, but I thought my face or voice might betray something about what had happened and where I was headed. Maybe I was afraid I would blurt everything out and they would try to talk me out of going.

Taking a circuitous route from further west on Boyette, I pulled in at Ned’s Tools & Tackle, where Vince and I had smoked out before school pretty much every day of our senior year at Bloomingdale High. It sat on the south side of the road a half mile or so from the intersection where I had turned on Friday. I parked beside a rusted dumpster in waist-high weeds at the back of the building.

Trudging along a drainage ditch that tracked the roadside and ducking repeatedly into the brush for cover at the gleam of approaching headlights, soon I was sprinting through the crossing into the orange grove. The rows sprawled out like vacant shuttles, nascent portals of the moonless night. Was the starlight waxing brighter, growing denser the further in I went? The second I told myself to shake off this ludicrous idea, I caught sight of that hulking wreck beyond the fence, huge and forlorn and broken on the pitch-black hill. It gave the impression of something that had always been there, a fixture in the landscape irradicable from its surroundings.

Looking away, I ducked between the skeins of barbed wire and pressed ahead into the cow field, telling myself that neither a building nor a hallowed hill had any power over me, and to think otherwise was a delusion. Presently, I found what had to be Vince’s boot prints, spaced out at a distance indicating the sprint with which he had raced through here. There wasn’t a single cow anywhere, and there didn’t seem to be any cow pies either, but there were indeed voluminous quantities of mushrooms. It was remarkable, beyond anything I had ever seen. Like the lambent domes of lunar cities, stout clusters jutted from the earth every dozen odd feet.

It dawned on me that Vince hadn’t picked any of the many shrooms I had seen so far, and most of them were too big to have popped up overnight. He had continued running in the direction of the forest that enclosed the field. A dense stand of oak and pine, it stretched from the grove edge on one end down a gradual slope to the lake on the other. Issuing from somewhere deep in the bowels of the woods, a stony creek rambled to the shore.

The creek marked the end of Vince’s boot prints. I wondered if he had turned and run the length of it to go for a swim in the lake, but after stepping across to the other side, I realized there was only one place he could be. Suddenly, whatever had compelled him onward was now calling out to me.

It started in my fingers, quickly worked its way into my hands, then surged up both arms and into my trunk. It seemed to concentrate itself in my solar plexus. Tingling, humming, throbbing—no single word or set of words can adequately describe it. You could hear it too, or so I thought, but I had a strong suspicion it was only internally audible, that if I had a tape recorder with me, static is all it would pick up. The only thing I can compare it too is the melody a jungle river would make if it had a mouth and a microphone.

“I refuse to allow a creepy earworm to wig me out,” I said aloud. “Humming in my body, soundtrack in my head, you can go fuck yourself.” I grinned and kept walking, surprised at my own audacity and the fact that I truly wasn’t afraid.

A small gap in the wall of trees was coming into view. It appeared to be a curving pathway that had been deliberately cleared. I fingered the Swiss army knife in my pocket, preparing to step inside, but before I could speculate on what might be waiting around the bend, I saw the glow of a candle, and the girl who held it emerging from the trailhead.

Clad in a black, body length dress, she held the lantern that bore the candle in one hand, and what I guessed was a Bible in the other. The flame illuminated a delicate, finely sculpted mouth, a perfectly proportioned nose, and deep-set, pale blue eyes. Curly red locks spilled from beneath the white bonnet that sat loosely on her head. She was maybe fifteen or sixteen.

We stood there looking at each other until we both tried to speak at once. Tripping over each other’s words mid-sentence, we stopped in unison. I paused, waiting for her to go first, tipping my head and gesturing for her to continue, but she said nothing. I began to open my mouth a second time but noticed her mouth opening once more along with mine, as if I were the ventriloquist and she were the puppet.

Clearly this called for a different tack. I closed my eyes, took deep, rhythmic breaths. Ever so slightly lifting my left eyelid to sneak a peek, I watched her breathing along with me, eyes shut. At the beginning of an exhalation, I interjected suddenly and forcefully: “Excuse me, you were going to say . . .”

She grimaced, quickly reversed it into a smile and opened her eyes. “Normally on the Sabbath we hold mass at midnight sharp,” she said, “but tonight is special.”

“What makes tonight special?” I asked.

“That would be our guest of honor,” a deep voice boomed out behind her. I instinctively knew it was the girl’s father. He strode up, candle lantern in hand, and stood beside her. He was lean and long-limbed, very tall, with pale grey eyes, a coarse black beard, and a black, broad-brimmed hat to match. If this was a costume party, I would have pegged him as an Abe Lincoln look-alike, but then it struck me: both the man and the girl wore Amish attire, or an imitation of it.

This observation was deeply unsettling to me, and as I tried to pinpoint why, pushing with everything in me against the rising tide of panic, things were happening very quickly. The girl had placed her lantern and Bible on the ground, stepped directly behind the man, and appeared to be fiddling with something strapped to his back that I couldn’t see. A boy, who bore a strong resemblance to the girl, was skipping down the path towards us. The man’s lips hovered somewhere between a sneer and a scowl, and I told myself, Look, there are three of them now, you have to move, you have to turn and run this very instant, but as I willed my body into motion, she had already leveled the barrel of the shotgun at me.

She fired as I was turning, catching me square in the side, knocking me off my feet. I figured I’d been blown in half, but as my hand went to the ribs that were surely broken, it came up dry. When I realized she had hit me with a bean bag round instead of buckshot, I felt like I had died and been resurrected.

“Well done, Selah,” I heard the man say, and then louder, “Josiah, bind him and bring him to the Lord!”

“Gladly, father,” the boy replied.

Josiah was on me almost immediately, but not before I had slid my right hand into my pocket, found the knife and cupped it under my abdomen. He ragdolled my left arm up behind my back, cinched a rope tie around my wrist, and went to work trying to jerk my right arm out from under me. I rolled to my left, twisting my torso beneath his straddling legs.

Having released my arm to steady himself, he rode me into a fully mounted position. The gleam in his eyes assured me he was going to smash my face in with great relish. He raised a fist to land the first blow, but my knife was faster. Flicked out and locked in place, the blade arced up and out in an ice pick grip, found a home in the side of his neck, sawed downward to the clavicle, then hammered in and out in a series of quick jabs.

He toppled over in a spray of red, frantically clutching his neck. I staggered to my feet and took off, moving in a zigzag pattern, expecting a beanbag or buckshot any second. When I finally dared a glance over my shoulder, I saw my would-be pursuers on the ground tending to Josiah, no doubt hoping for a miracle.

There was now ample distance between us. Halfway to the creek, my relief was so tremendous I felt I was being lifted into the sky. The field was no longer a field but an invisible staircase. I was bounding higher with every step, surging up a ramp into the clouds. There was a soft whirring sound, as if helicopter blades or the wings of angels were—

It was a bola sailing through the air and twisting around my legs like a boa constrictor. I was mere feet from the creek when it felled me. Before I had time to wonder which direction it had been flung from, I was crashing facedown against a rock in the water, where everything went black.

There are some things that engrave themselves so deeply in the furrows of your mind, that once you have lived them, they cannot be removed. Things that will be with you until the final curtain comes tumbling down. Things that time can’t erase, that alcohol can’t drown, that therapy can’t silence. That will riddle your days and haunt your nights forever.

What I heard in that waking moment, what returned me to consciousness beneath the sack they had placed over my head, was one of those damning, irrevocable things. It was a jarring, singular sound, an indelible sound that had been amplified to an urgency beyond comprehension. Both deeply intimate and wholly other, it was a human sound that spoke more than any amount of language could possibly express.

It was Vince screaming, and at first, I couldn’t convince myself that I wasn’t dreaming, that this couldn’t be anything other than a horrible nightmare. The throbbing in my head said otherwise, and the awareness of my breathing cinched it. Still, I hadn’t yet seen Vince, and this allowed the smallest doubt to creep in, to suggest that maybe it wasn’t him I was hearing after all. But then, having seen me wriggling my back against the tree, struggling in vain to break the rope that bound my wrists to the trunk, they pulled the sack from my head.

Vince was enclosed, standing up, in some sort of metal coffin reminiscent of an iron maiden. His head poked out the top. His arms extended horizontally through holes in the sides, stretched out by chains trussed to tree trunks. The blazing flames of shiny cressets planted in the ground were burning the middles of both of his arms.

“Let him go,” I shouted, “let him go and I’ll take his place!”

A figure kneeling at an altar near Vince turned and rose to his feet. He had the body of a man minus one arm, and the arm he had appeared far too long to have grown from the trunk it was attached to. Ditto for the spindly fingers that forked from his hand like the spokes of a chariot. He was crowned with the human sized head of a rooster, an ornate, furry mask sitting atop the black habit of a priest. A man’s voice, sibilant and deep, issued from the unmoving beak.

“Your courage will be rewarded,” he said. He took a dagger from the altar, walked over to Vince, and buried the blade in his heart. He returned the dagger to the altar and addressed the congregation. “Serve him the sacrament and bring him forward.”

The sacrament was a sludgy mushroom tea they poured down my throat until I retched. Sufficiently drugged, I was confined in the standing coffin where Vince had been burned, his body having been chucked in the bonfire opposite the altar. My arms were stretched out by chains as his had been, over the now extinguished cressets.

Feeling the queasy stirrings of an impending psilocybin trip, and acutely aware that, barring a miracle, these would be the last sober moments of my life, I took stock of my surroundings. We were in the forest under thick canopy, on what appeared to be an artificial island. A narrow wooden bridge crossed a steep, concrete lined moat fed by a channel of the creek. The bridge terminated in a screen door that opened to the island, the entire length of which was covered by the mesh and metal frame of an aviary.

The congregation sat on stumps beside the tree I had been tied to, flanked by a pair of oaks where dozens of birds were nested. I counted seventeen people, among them, Selah and her father, all dressed in the Amish style, including one whose face was hidden by a balaclava. The rooster headed priest, who was surely the Lord of these woods, was busy at the altar, making signs and chanting in Hebrew, and the music, the internal music, was coming back.

Its pitch and tone had shifted, modulated by the ancient words resounding over the altar. It was more insistent this time. It seemed to say to me, I am the Voice of this land, not the Lord you see before you. He is but an instrument of my Voice, or rather, he is my instrument. He is the radio and I am the song. I am the origin and substance of the Voice you hear.

The congregation was on their feet. The Lord faced them. He uttered a long, plangent chant. They bowed, replying in unison, “We will rejoice in the music of the Lord.” They stood, he chanted, they bowed and replied a second time, “For the birds of the air obey him.”

The Lord’s next chant was followed by a flight of birds from the branches. They whirled in circles through the air above his head, until he raised his hand, prompting them to land and form a triangle around him. To this, the congregation bowed and replied, “Blessed be the will of the Lord.”

Then all at once their eyes were on me, even those of the birds. Selah and her father were heading my way, lanterns in hand, and light was coming down on everything, saturating everything in a glistering, sheening refulgence, and—was I already burned and dead? No, I was breathing—shiny scraps of light were blowing in the wind, like the page of that Psalm in my dream last night, an escaping wish flapping off into the ether, like that Psalm I memorized in Hebrew at Camp Gilead in my twelfth summer, Psalm 23.

The light gave way like a slab of falling stone, revealing Selah to my right, her father to my left, and the primal words of the Psalm were on my tongue, the only verse of it I could remember, the final verse, verse 6. She was tipping the candle to the pitch of the cresset, and my lips gave voice to the chanting of the verse, Akh tov va-khe-sed yir-d’-fu-nee kol y’may kha-yai v’shav-tee b’-vayt Adonai l-o-rekh ya-meem.

Not wanting to watch the burning of my arms, I had closed my eyes, but the pain didn’t come. Two birds were flapping furiously, extinguishing the cresset each time Selah tried to light it.

“Enough,” her father barked, “put this heathen to the flame.” He swatted a hand at one of the birds and was repaid with the darting beak of another gouging a deep gash in his forehead.

The Lord intervened, slowly lifting his hand in the air as he chanted the Hebrew of what I recognized as the first verse of Psalm 23. This triggered my memory of the other verses, and I followed up his chant in like manner with the second verse. He responded with the third verse and was approaching me with the dagger, but as I chanted the fourth verse, a wall of birds rose between us, issuing a winged warning to the Lord to back away from me, which he did with slow, measured steps.

Some of the congregants were bowing in my direction. Others, wearing nervous, frightful expressions, awaited the response of the Lord. The birds formed a triangle on the ground around me, and before I knew it was happening, the English of the fourth verse was singing from my throat: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”

“This one,” said the Lord, “is Flesh of My Flesh, and on this day, he shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” He waved over the balaclava clad figure, whispered in his ear, and finished his address to the congregation. “The deacon will see our guest safely to the road.”

Not a word passed between us as my masked escort marched me off the island, down the trail through the woods, across the field and over the creek, past the ruin-crowned hill and out the unlocked metal gate. Everything was a swirling mass of color and sound, but I hadn’t lost my sense of direction. I recognized the dirt road across the clearing and knew it would lead me to Boyette. Then as if to pull me back, my companion spoke. It was a familiar voice.

“You know the way out, so I don’t need to tell you.” He removed the balaclava. I wasn’t surprised to see it was the sheriff from the other day. “But before you go, you look here. I’m on to you, boy. That was nothin’ but a schoolboy trick you pulled back there with them birds. You ain’t got the powers of the Lord. You ain’t got his music.”

“No, I am not the Voice of the Lord. The Voice you hear is . . .” I stopped myself, certain that saying anymore would amount to a grave error.

“No, you damn sure ain’t. Shit, them mushrooms got you talkin’ gibberish. Your pupils are ‘bout the size of watermelons. But trippin’ or not, you better listen real close. I know where your folks stay. If you ever tell anyone about this place, I’ll put a bullet in your daddy while he’s sleepin’. I’ll pin the murder on you and they’ll send you up for life if you’re lucky, to the chair if you’re not. And your momma? I’ll throw her in my trunk, bring her to the woods and burn her. Are we clear on that, boy?”

“Yes, I understand. I’ll never tell a soul.” I turned and walked down the road, and I kept my promise.

That was over twenty years ago. A few years back, they began clearing the land in that stretch of Boyette to make way for the thousands of homes that would comprise Osprey Ranch. One day driving past, after they had leveled the trees, I saw the hill in the distance. Surrounded by an orange construction fence, it looked much smaller than I remembered. The next week it was gone, having been bulldozed into oblivion.

Like a dog who knows its owner has died miles away, I knew the music of that land had forever vanished with the hill. I finally began to forget what had happened there so long ago, and at times I even convinced myself these were false memories, a defense mechanism thrown up by the mind to compensate for the trauma of my friend’s disappearance. But this morning the headline in the Tampa Bay Times took me back like it was yesterday: Authorities seek public’s help in identifying body of one-armed man. A backyard dig for the installation of a pool in Osprey Ranch had turned up the remains. It was what the article didn’t say that I found most telling. There was no mention of a cause of death. Something told me he had met a violent and fiery end, and as Flesh of His Flesh, I would know, wouldn’t I?

***

Jonathan Simkins is the translator of El Creacionismo by Vicente Huidobro (The Lune). His translations of César Dávila Andrade have appeared most recently in Bennington Review, Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. His fiction has appeared in Close To The Bone.