Among The Cloud Dwellers (Entrainment Series) (18 page)

“So here I am, at your service.” Jason bowed gallantly.

“So why are you so special?” Benedetta asked him.

Jason grinned somewhere up around a thousand watts and made matters even more intriguing, telling us that Delilah not only was his mother, but also his generous benefactor. She had paid for his art school tuition.

Benedetta and I exchanged a look. That made Pop Delilah’s husband. I couldn’t wait to meet her.

Skimming the livid glare of a row of Carmen Miranda look-alikes at the bar, Jason escorted us into the kitchen through a multicolored beaded curtain that tinkled like chimes as we passed through. We stepped into a spacious kitchen with industrial-sized appliances. On the walls chilies and garlic garlands held hands, festively hanging between wooden shelves stacked with jars of spices, herbs, legumes, and rice. I believe I saw frog legs and lizard’s tails. Or maybe a hint of voodoo fueled my imagination.

A back door opened onto a small courtyard allowing a cool breeze to ventilate the space and tousle the beaded curtain behind us. On a miniature altar, a porcelain Virgin Mary looked down on a tiny vase of fresh daisies. A fake snake coiled by her feet, strangling a shot glass filled to the rim with what I suspected to be spiced rum.

Holy Mother, may I introduce to you Damballah?

The mouthwatering aromas of steaming bread pudding tickled my nose, and my eyes landed on an ancient black woman standing on a small stool stirring a large pot. She smiled at us as we approached her, then, without missing a beat of her stirring, she called over her shoulder in a raspy voice, “Delilah! Your guests are here!”

Framed by the open back door, a silhouette appeared. A ghostly line of smoke rose off a cigarillo hanging from the naked lips of Ezili’s human manifestation. The Haitian goddess stood in front of us dressed in a brightly flowered sundress. A jet-black braid crowned her head, and yellow tiger-eyes smiled at us warmly above flawless mocha cheekbones so high and sharp they could cut through glass. She pushed off the doorframe, extending her arms. Now I knew where Jason got his looks.

“Welcome,” she purred, taking both my hands in hers. “You must be Porzia.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Delilah.” I wondered if I ought to curtsy.

“And this must be your . . .
blessed
friend.” She let go of my hands to take Benedetta’s.

“Hello,” Benedetta said in her cool, friendly voice.

“Hello,” Delilah answered. “I dreamed about your visit.” She stared at Benedetta. “Evil has been lingering. I dreamed a blessed soul would come and restore balance.”

Delilah’s words sent shivers down my spine.

“This night calls for a celebration. Aeson, honey, would you fetch some of Mama’s
agua
?” she asked her husband in a purr.

I gasped silently. Benedetta had guessed right about Pop’s name.
What the hell was going on?

From beans I had been catapulted into Congo Square. I could feel Marie Laveau oozing in from the afterlife. It was happening quite often lately; I kept finding myself in the midst of some sort of esoteric endeavor. I shook my head and trailed behind Benedetta and Delilah out the back door into the small courtyard.

Aeson followed with a tray holding three small shot glasses and an old bottle filled with a foggy liquid. He left us as we sat around a cast iron table on matching chairs covered with floral-print cushions.

Night jasmine and honeysuckle sweetly scented a gentle breeze. A tall brick wall surrounded the courtyard, giving us a sense of privacy and the feeling we were all alone.

“Gerome called. He said you’d be coming up to write about some of my recipes,” Delilah said as she poured the liqueur. “How is he?”

Gerome is my mailman and second cousin to an innumerable amount of culinarily dedicated relatives sprinkled throughout the Bible Belt.

“He’s doing pretty well,” I answered distractedly. My eyes widened as she lit a match and set the contents of the glasses on fire.

“What are you doing?” Benedetta at her best, mincing no words.

“This is Mama’s
aguardiente
. A distilled, mystical concoction I won’t divulge.” Delilah looked at us. “Once the excess alcohol burns off only the concentrated essence remains. That’s when you drink it, but we must wait until it has cooled a bit. Patience is everything.”

We settled thoughtfully to wait while the ethereal flames danced and died.

An irreverent breeze tousled my hair, bringing the notes of a blues guitar to my ears as if from a distance. High above, the moon had reached her peak and lingered, curious, to wait with us before resuming her descent.

Benedetta is not good at waiting. “So, what am I supposed to do for you?” she asked Delilah bluntly.

Overhead, I thought I heard the moon sigh in exasperation. Maybe it was me.

Delilah’s amber eyes swept us. She frowned, struggling to find the right words. “Evil has been meddling with my ingredients, spoiling things up.” Her subtle accent told me Jamaica wasn’t that distant in her past.

Benedetta pushed her glasses up her nose. “Uh—could you be a little more specific?” she pressed.

“Humidity. This year it has been impossible. My saffron, for example.” Delilah paused dramatically, making a rubbing movement with her thumbs and two fingers, like sprinkling a pinch of salt on a dish. “Or my cayenne. Or cinnamon. Not silky dry, but pasty.” She paused again, dramatically. “Fungus-like.”

Her words had such vivid impact I actually visualized the saffron clotting.

“An oath has been spoken,” Delilah whispered, as if saying the words out loud would enhance the evil powers. Her eyes sparkled like topaz. She picked up her shot glass and gulped the agua down, throwing her head backwards. Amazing how her braid remained in place against such a sudden jerk.

We tried to follow her example. She had made it look so easy, like a shot of regular water.

It was fire. It burned down my throat. It stung my eyes and seared my lungs. It blazed in my stomach. I had just swallowed liquid lava. I coughed, I cried, I grabbed my stomach. I wanted to roll on the ground in agony. I wished I were a dragon to spit fire back at her.

Benedetta fared no better. Her nose ran mercilessly, and her eyes glowed red. Her entire face was red. Smoke came out her ears.

“
Oddio!
” I wiped my eyes.

“What the hell was that?” Benedetta choked.

“You said it right,
sistah
.” Delilah looked at Benedetta. She refilled our glasses and lit them up once again.

Was this woman out of her mind?
Frantically I searched for an acceptable reason to refuse the second shot.

I have faced difficult situations before, mostly in foreign countries where etiquette requirements differ and where offending your host is a matter of
professional
life or death, but to cross a voodoo believer in her dwellings—even though she offered us liquid hell—called for extreme caution.

“Here, the second one is a lot smoother,” Delilah said, raising her tiny glass to toast us. There she went, throwing her head back again, enjoying every drop of it.

Benedetta had more guts than me. She took the second shot and held a napkin on her face, crying into it. Screaming into it. Biting it.

Oddio! I thought she said the second one was supposed to be easier.

“This was as painful as losing my virginity,” Benedetta mumbled into her napkin.

“Not as bad as childbirth,” Delilah observed, settling back in her chair. She lit a thin cigarillo and looked at me, waiting; her friendly tiger-eyes glittered, bemused.

I pinched my nose, lifted my glass, and drained it. My tonsils burst into flames, and I closed my eyes for fear my eye sockets might detach like parts of the space shuttle skyrocketing into the universe. They were going to make a saint out of me after this. I momentarily toyed with thoughts of people crawling from far away to witness my miraculous remains, preserved in a crystal case for posterity, defying decay thanks to the agua I had been pickled in. The devoted pilgrims, totally unaware of such chemical mysteries, would babble
miracle
in a cacophony of foreign languages I couldn’t hear in the safety of my crystal cocoon.

Devotees
un corno
. It was Benedetta’s babbling. She was trying to shake me back to life by shoving a glass of water down my throat.

I drank like there was no tomorrow. I hoped tomorrow would never come. I couldn’t begin to imagine how my stomach would punish me come morning.

“Are you back, Porzia?” Benedetta asked. She cradled my head in her hands.

“Yes. I’m fine,” I lied. I focused on her and noticed that, other than her flushed cheeks, she looked normal.

How come?

I must have asked that out loud because she answered me. “You’ll be fine in seconds. The effects fade really fast.”

I looked at her and decided I wanted to crawl back into my crystal case. I wanted to trade places with Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, either one, it didn’t matter . . . and then my head cleared.
Poof!
The fog lifted. Miraculously, I was back in my skin, in Aunt Delilah’s courtyard in Savannah, Georgia. All was cool, the night air included. I suppressed a shiver. I glanced at my watch; it read midnight.

“Come, sisters. Let me show you my spices,” Delilah said, tipping the ashes off her cigarillo. She pushed off her chair and led us back into her kitchen.

I stood and followed her, somehow managing to keep my dignity. I glanced at Benedetta; she seemed fine, actually enjoying herself.

Compared to the courtyard’s breeze, the kitchen tickled and moistened my nostrils like an aromatic yet stifling sauna. By the main sink, Jason wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand and continued stacking a dishwasher, while the raspy-voiced older lady Delilah introduced as her
mama
cleared the counters.

“Dad’s got it under control out there. He’s closing down,” Jason said, pointing toward the dining room with his chiseled chin. Frowning, he cast a disapproving look at his mother. “You shouldn’t bother these ladies, Mom—”

“Thank you, hon.” With firm authority Delilah silenced her son and reached for a jar on one of the shelves. She pulled the cork lid off and sniffed the contents. Disgust twisted her features. She offered me the jar to sniff at. “See what I mean?”

I took a look inside and noticed how the cinnamon had clustered into wet spots resembling melted wax. Its pungent odor tickled my nostrils, bringing to mind the early stages of autolysis; that jolly revolt—post-death occurrence—when the digestive juices begin to break down the gastrointestinal tract.
Odd for cinnamon,
I thought, it being a spice with one of the longest shelf lives.

Delilah continued on, showing us her spoiled vanilla beans coated with a gray fungus; her saffron, carefully wrapped in cotton gauze had stained the pure-white material with red, bleeding streaks. Her cayenne had lost all its zest. Her bottom lip quivered and her eyes welled with tears.

I had no idea how to help her. The only thing I could think of rationally was that the cork lids might have caught some sort of moldy virus that had spread to several of her jars. I suggested that she toss out the affected jars and buy brand-new ones. Jason seemed to agree with me. He wiped his hands on a kitchen towel and told me he had already suggested something similar to her a few weeks back.

Delilah believed it was a curse from an envious acquaintance. She had asked for divine intervention and dreamt about a blessing soon to be delivered.

The blessing in question was busy entertaining naughty mythological thoughts with Jason as the unquestionable protagonist. Jason certainly seemed to be enjoying the attention.

Oh, this ought to be interesting,
I thought. I had never seen Benedetta practice The Craft. I crossed my arms and leaned against the immaculate stainless counter. I kicked Bene’s shin, bringing her attention back to the present. She shot me a resentful look, recovered quickly, and asked Delilah if she knew the name of the person who had started all the trouble. Delilah nodded. Benedetta pushed her glasses up her nose and cleared her throat. “Well, it’s an auspicious time to get rid of negativity, for the moon is indeed waning out there . . .”

I had no idea what she was talking about but felt awed and afraid to interrupt.

“Delilah, you’ll need to write the name of the person in question on a piece of paper. You then fold the paper four times to have the sealing of all four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. Then, you take the ruined spices, jars and all, and you go out there.” She pointed toward the courtyard and tugged Delilah’s arm, drawing her closer. She cupped her hands around Delilah’s delicate ear and whispered the rest of her spell.

Delilah kept on nodding as if what was being told to her made perfect sense.

“. . . And make sure you’re beneath the moonlight the entire time,” Benedetta finished, stepping back. A look of satisfaction spread across her face, like light returning to the dark sky after a lunar eclipse.

Jason and I had been completely forgotten.

Delilah hugged Benedetta in gratitude and asked me if I would now care to talk about the recipes I came to write about. I told her I was ready and asked her if my work would intrude with her curse-riddance plans.

“Oh no! Now that I know what to do I can take care of it later when everybody’s gone.” Her eyes moved up and left, as if repeating a well-memorized lesson.

Jason invited Benedetta to follow him into the dining room to take photos, promising to return to shoot the display of ingredients Mama was setting up for us on the spotless counter. I began to take notes of her Smoked Ham and Bean Soup and Traditional Corn Muffins recipes.

“The secret of the soup is to make sure the ham hasn’t been de-boned, and I usually sauté some of the juiciest morsels with a little butter and onions, until the onions are translucent. About ten minutes on low heat,” Delilah told me. “That releases the ham flavor and infuses the stock much quicker.” She paused, running her hands through a heaping bowl of multicolored dried beans, her crimson-varnished nails a vivid contrast.