Together they approached the magnificent foxglove. Iris von Lillienfeld crooned away, notifying it of its imminent journey. It was no small task. What seemed to be a simple four-foot fixture turned into a person-sized thing with its heavy, gangling roots exposed, and Iris insisted on getting every root up. “Vatch dat one!” she cried. “Yoy! Vorsichtig! Careful, careful!”
And Claire was careful. She’d forgotten how nice it was to get your fingers good and filthy dirty with the fragrant, deep-dug earth. You remembered your own mud pies. You forgot that winter ever froze New York and left you with nothing out of doors but brittle twigs and rigid ground. This lush beauty fooled you, let you think it would go on forever. Iris stooped over her, a ravaged cameo worried for her dear foxglove, her single sprouts of whisker very evident and sturdy in the horizontal light.
Together they tugged and they pulled. Still the foxglove wouldn’t budge. Claire began to think that maybe it had a mind of its own. Why move the thing to a sunnier spot when it had grown this indomitable where it was? Perhaps it would very simply refuse. No, it couldn’t do that. Iris was determined. It could very well up and die, though. No. No, on second thought, Iris would keep it alive just by watching it. She’d talk it back to health if she had to. Now Iris stuck the pitchfork into the hole and wobbled the lower roots. Son of a gun, marveled Claire, she’s stronger than I am, the old faker. Iris looked at her quickly, maybe reading her thoughts. “It’s chust a matter of balance,” she explained. “Like jujitsu.” And out came the foxglove.
“I see.”
“Und den you can put dose pansies back in the shadow,” Iris instructed her, the kindly film star to the Mexican gardener. Claire didn’t mind, though. She’d waited for so long to get in touch with the old woman that she kept doggedly on, her nails already split and caked with black. And Iris didn’t bother with conversation. She stood alongside quietly, apprehensively watching for signs of any agonized branch.
The Mayor was performing for Natasha, Iris’s poodle, who watched condescendingly from the ivy. He covered his complete routine of independent jumps and snout grovels and he did them well, then flopped to the ground with a weary change of heart.
Claire’s knees were black now, too. The white shorts she’d borrowed from Zinnie were stained with grass. “Oh, hell,” she said when she saw that.
“Dat’s all right,” Iris prodded her impatiently with the shovel handle, “you’ll get your reward in de other vorld.”
So Claire continued. There was a whole new other hole to dig to put the flower in. She had a great belief in the “other world.” She also knew that foreign diabolical spirits could enter into your body without your even knowing it if you put yourself in a susceptible position. Such as going to Macumba ceremonies and uncrossing your legs when the devil came in. Don’t laugh, she told herself even as she started to laugh into the mud. Remember the zombie girl down in Rio? Yes, it was true that that girl had let herself in for it, selling her soul to Fatiema the hag just to hook up with some no-account hot socks from the Gerada de Ipanema. What had she paid her? Forty dollars? Something like that. A couple of laughs. And it had worked. Yes, indeed. That beautiful man had hung around that girl as though his life had depended on it. It had, sort of. She’d had to give him all the money she’d earned in San Paulo. The girl would sit there in the Gerada de Ipanema with her vodka lime and stare at the carnivali world with vacant oozy eyes and wait for him. And he’d beat her, too. That poor girl. She hadn’t had much of a life but she’d had him. She’d had what she’d really wanted and gone for … easily, simply … on a dare, really. But she’d done it. Yes, not everybody believed in it, but Claire knew that you could have anything you wanted in the world. All from black magic with chickens flying in a grungy candlelit “church.” You could have what you wanted all right. What they didn’t tell you was all that went with it, what a price you had to pay. Claire knew. She’d been the zombie girl.