Just What The Doctor Ordered

Splish, splish, the oars stroked the water to the rhythmic beat of tom toms.  Doctor Villard watched himself pulling at an oar.  The smell of salt water and sweat cut through the gloom.  Gripped round the splintery shaft of wood, his hands leaked blood. Villard vaguely felt grateful for not feeling pain.  Before him, a black body moved in perfect synchronicity to his.  Before that man, rowed another and another.  All were cramped into the low ceiling hold of the small ship.

    Someone began prying his fingers off the oar.  The doctor stared listlessly at the drooped, hunched figure.  When Villard first met the man, the fellow had been a stevedore on the docks of Port-au-Prince, huge and healthy.  Now, like all aboard, the pitiful wraith was enslaved to Jacques Gros, the bocor, maker of zombies.

    The slave thrust a stone bowl into the doctor’s hands.  Villard’s left hand clamped onto the bottom of the bowl.  He watched his right form itself into a scoop that began shoveling gobs of sticky paste into his mouth.  He sucked the sweet mash off his fingers in loud slurps.

    The server went back up into the bow of the boat and began pounding more of the porridge with a pestle in a large iron pot to the incessant beat of the drums coming from a boom box perched on a shelf near the prow.  Struggling to taste the gooey paste, Villard recalled that the mixture contained yams and portions of a plant in the genus datura, the nightshade.  It was what had brought the doctor to Haiti.  Villard had been writing a report about the use of datura that night.

    The clickety clack of his manual typewriter echoing in the rude village hut had covered the sounds of drumbeats.  Until he couldn’t type anymore.  Dr. Villard had still been able to see his fingers poised above the keyboard.  He just hadn’t been able to make them move anymore.  Then he’d heard the drums coming closer, beating in sympathetic rhythm to his heart which slowed as his perception of time increased.

    It had taken so long to die, so damnably long.  The villagers had called in a doctor who called in a specialist who called in the regional medical examiner.  Dr. Villard was an eminent man, an American.  No one had wanted to make a mistake.  They’d waited four days before laying him into the grave.  Paralyzed and helpless, he’d observed all the medical examinations and had listened to the doctors consulting.  He had heard the burial too, the clomp, clomp of dirt falling on his coffin. Then there’d been nothing but endless black until the drums had woken him.

   The bocor had baptized him into this new form of existence; one would hardly call it life.  Jacques Gros had even given him a new name.  The man making the porridge called him by it now.

    “Reka, the bocor be wanting you.”

    Villard stumbled along the keel line stepping past the dozen sets of rowers, one man to each side.  The misshapen ceiling was so low he had to walk stooped over staring down into the black bilge water, ankle deep and rising from the leaky seams and pounding spray pouring through the open hatches fore and aft.   

    When Villard reached the forward opening, he hesitated.  The doctor hadn’t seen sunlight since coming from the grave, and the sky above was brilliant blue.

    “Come up here,” the bocor said.

    Villard heard and obeyed.  In the blinding light, he had difficulty keeping his footing as the slippery deck pitched and heaved.  He still wore the leather shoes he’d been buried in and they were slick with mold.   

    Jacques Gros, the bocor, scampered barefoot into the cabin mid ship.  Villard had trouble keeping the man in sight.  As the ship rolled, the doctor’s vision lurched from blue foaming waves and dazzling sun down to the decking where zombies rolled across the planks.  Half a dozen had been tightly wrapped into tarps to sleep since there was no room below.  While he was stepping over one of the bodies, the ship tilted violently to port, and a bundled wretch rolled clear up top the gunwale and overboard.  Villard’s lurching gait nearly carried him after before the deck pitched back to starboard sending him hurtling through the doorway of the jerry-built hutch centered on the vessel.   

    The bocor grabbed the doctor adroitly and spun him into a chair.  Half the weight and twice the age of Villard, Jacques Gros moved with the easy grace of Haitians.  Only his skin wrinkled over sinew and bone betrayed his age.

    “I wish to talk with you about America,” the bocor said.

    The compartment seemed surprisingly large for a ten meter sloop, but Villard hardly trusted his vision especially amidst such a jumble.  Nearly all the available space was taken up by boxes varying in size and color held to the walls by intricate tangles of bungee cords.  The two men sat on folding chairs on opposite sides of a card table in the small open area at the center of the enclosure.  Bolts of fabric, trinkets, and various valuables spilled from the boxes as the ship heaved, all the loot Jacques Gros had managed to bring aboard before being driven off by a howling mob.  Bottles of fine rum rolled back and forth as the ship swayed.  They kept banging into the doctor’s ankles, but Villard soon stopped feeling them as the bocor ordered him to pay attention.  The command required all the feeble remains of his mind.

    “Listen to me very carefully now.  I know how difficult it is for you to concentrate,” Jacques Gros said.

    Dr. Villard struggled to follow the bocor’s words.  Once he had tried to pay Jacques Gros to talk, to reveal how he extracted poison from puffer fish and forest toads.  Word of the old man’s vast pharmacological knowledge had even reached The States.  Now Villard kept forgetting the bocor was speaking in a Creole dialect peculiar to Haiti, and then the words would just sound like sibilant nonsense.

    Villard had often thought about all toxins the bocor must have absorbed over the years.  Many of the anesthetics and hallucinogens in his potions were designed to permeate directly though the skin, and it was doubtful the bocor even owned a pair of gloves.  It wasn’t hard to imagine the old man as mad as a hatter, especially now.

    Jacques Gros was talking about rowing all the way to Florida and setting up shop in Miami.  He began questioning Villard about what he knew of the Haitian community there.  It was a tedious process.  Villard couldn't manage much more than a yes or no.  His mind and his mouth seemed a far ways apart.

    “You know where to find the Tonton Macouotes in Miami?” Jacques Gros asked.

    Through casual conversations, Villard had learned that a dishwasher at a restaurant he frequented was a former member of Duvalier regime’s dreaded secret police.  Did this mean he knew where to find the Tonton Macouotes, the doctor wondered?

    “Yes, at the Café Carumba,” he heard himself reply.

    Absurdly, the recollection came that whenever he visited the Café Carumba, the proprietor would try and entice him to try the menudo, a lung soup the doctor detested.

    “Good, you may rest until the voyage ends.  Take this tarp and sleep on the deck.”

    Villard remembered the body that had just rolled overboard, but had no will to resist the bocor’s order.  When a wave finally did toss him into the water, he hadn’t the will to resist drowning either.  Cocooned in his plastic tarp, Villard was content to let the waves toss him about idly speculating how it would feel to die a second time, but what the doctor felt was first his right then his left shoulder hitting the sandy bottom as the waves flung him ashore.

    Night had fallen.  A line of palmetto trees framed the beach with a twinkling of lights beyond.  The doctor would have been content to remain in his wrap rolling along the shore, but the bocor was calling him from beyond the waves.

    “Reka, come back.”

    Villard struggled to untangle himself from the plastic sheeting.  He caught a glimpse of the flimsy boat drifting just beyond the breakers, but by the time he managed to free himself, it had vanished in the darkness.

    Stumbling inland through a spotty forest of scrub pine and oak, the doctor heard dogs barking as the trees gave way to a raw new subdivision of tract homes.  A front door opened on his right, a car pulled into a driveway on his left, and ahead under a street lamp, two people were quietly talking.

    “You okay, buddy?”  One of them asked as he passed.

    “Wow, you look like death warmed over,” the other remarked.

    Villard ignored them both and continued trudging towards the freeway beyond, but before he reached it, a police car and ambulance pulled up before him.  The doctor made no effort to resist as the paramedics strapped him onto a gurney and sped him to a hospital.

    He was hardly more of a participant in the ensuing round of medical exams and consultations than he had been for those done in Haiti.  Again for four days the doctors ran tests and consulted.  The prognosis called for him to remain in the hospital for rehabilitation of the extensive brain damage done by oxygen deprivation and drug use, but of course that was impossible.  Dr. Villard had to find the bocor.  He slipped away as soon as he summoned the wits to steal street clothes and money from his roommate.

    The only place he could think where to look was the Café Carumba in the Latin Quarter of the city.  Villard counted himself lucky that he’d washed ashore so close to Miami and hoped the bocor remembered the restaurant he’d named as the place to meet Tonton Macouotes.  He couldn’t recall how to get there, but fortunately, the cabbie did.

     Taking his usual table along the wall towards the back, Villard struggled to focus on the menu.  His brain was too badly damaged for him to be able to read anymore, but by staring at the calypso themed dancers adorning the borders, he hoped to call up some memory of what he liked to eat here.  At least he knew what he didn’t want, menudo.  When the waiter came up beside him, Villard struggled all the more to remember.

    “Reka, the kitchen need someone to wash dishes.  That man be you.”

    Villard stared up at the face of his waiter, Jacques Gros.

    “Yes master,” he replied.

    “Have the menudo,” the bocor commanded.

    “Just as you order,” the doctor replied.

The end