Godhead Read online

  GODHEAD

  A novel by Jordan Alexander

  Copyright 2011 Jordan Alexander

  Kindle Edition

  Cover Design by Elisa Suetake

  Follow my blog at

  http://jalexanderwrites.blogspot.com/

  A novel is a monstrous wonderful creation that takes the combined efforts of many people staying up later than they should.

  This book is dedicated to the village it took to raise it, and my muse, who sings to me in a loud caustic voice over coffee at three in the morning.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One- Many Colors

  Chapter Two- My Father’s House

  Chapter Three- History

  Chapter Four- The Cross We Bear

  Chapter Five- La Madre

  Chapter Six- Promised Land

  Chapter Seven- Yield

  Chapter Eight- Stones

  Chapter Nine- Creation

  Chapter Ten- Brimstone

  Chapter Eleven- Walls

  Chapter Twelve- Veils

  Chapter Thirteen- Offerings and Altars

  Chapter Fourteen- Swallowed

  Chapter Fifteen- Plagues

  Chapter Sixteen- Storm Brewing

  Chapter Seventeen- Deluge

  Chapter Eighteen- Body

  Chapter Nineteen-Limbo

  Chapter Twenty- Soul

  Author Bio

  PART ONE

  GENESIS

  Around the plantation, the mangoes were dropping sex all over the ground.

  Julián explained the love life of fruit as we studied the drupes laying in tawdry overripe little piles gaudy with flies. My shoes sank into the wet black earth as he talked.

  He spoke in a matter of fact manner of sex and fruit without embarrassment or titillation. Back home, boys his age were trying to decide whether to shave the scrim of hair hovering above their lips or flaunt it. Julián was only two years older than me, but he already looked like a man. He was compact and brown with alert black eyes that never rested on anything, flicking from branch to branch. He talked over my head and he touched me frequently, his fingers warm on my skin.

  I took off my mud-heavy shoes and left them under a tree, followed him as he cut through the trees and thick undergrowth, his words swallowed up by the thick green soup. When he walked he touched every tree he passed, making sudden turns or stops for no apparent reason, as though the jungle whispered only to him, leading him in a silent leafy language.

  All of the sudden the trees were gone and we were on the beach, just like that, walking through a magic door Julián had the key to. The sea air blew away the moisture of the forest and filled our lungs with fresh salt. A big warm tongue of sand licked my toes. We sat on the shore just under the shade of a hibiscus that grew cabbage-sized flowers like it had taken too many vitamins.

  Without any hesitation he leaned over and kissed me. I had expected my first kiss to be an awkward affair, but Julián was so agile he gave me expertise. He pulled his warm dry lips away from my sticky ones and ran his fingers over my face with little taps and strokes, searching for cracks in a fragile dish. Then he sat back and took a mango out of his pocket, a decent lady that was still slightly green on one side and had been minding her business hanging on the tree. With a small knife, he flick-flecked back and forth and swirled over its surface carving the likeness of my face. Every so often he ran the pads of his fingers over it checking to see if the curves felt authentic.

  When he was done I recognized myself in the orange flesh, my eyes and lips staring serenely out of the side of a fruit. The artistry was too beautiful to eat so I licked it a few times, puckering at the sour sweet tang. I wanted to lick his lips instead. Sun-brazen, I did just that, tasting smoky-soft secrets on his chapped skin. The sand molded to my back as he did that same little tap and stroke over my neck, my chest just forming buds and, ever so lightly but no more, over my white cotton underpants. I grabbed his bare toes with mine and hung on for dear life.

  Because of this, I would become a murderer, a harlot, and a thief.

  Because of this, I ended up selling my soul. But I did not know that yet.

  We are all our mother’s daughters, all the way back to Eve.

  Chapter One

  MANY COLORS

  When they found my father’s body, it appeared he had been praying, before the jungle clenched its fist around him and stopped his heart. He had left me, a daughter he had met only once years before, all his earthly possessions: a banana plantation, a middling bank account, and a secret history. Without considering the consequences I ran from all I knew, fled responsibility, and air conditioning, and the envy of my mother; landed myself thousands of miles away in this place where my intentions were less than clear.

  Most cities of the world are interchangeable, skyline after skyline, symmetry of commerce and time tables. Belize City was disconnected, tattooed with birds and fruit, with dogs and naked children. It was a rush hour of bicycles, a cacophony of bells, the waddle of the plump chicken behinds, of rubber sandaled women hawking wares from tables laden with yellows and reds, oranges and greens.

  Ten years had done very little to change this country, but they had concealed my origins completely. My false blond hair, my beige clothes and silk stockings, hid the fact that the blood of this land ran beneath my skin, jungle drums throbbed in my veins, drowning out my mother’s ancestors.

  I was my own unexplored country.

  I checked into the Hotel Paridisio and tried to sleep even though it was afternoon. The pillows were hard, the bathroom was moldy, and all of the sheets and towels were stamped with the names of hotels from New York, California, and San Francisco. I wondered how they had ended up here.

  I did not even know how I had ended up here.

  In the beginning were my mother and father. But they kept the rest of their story to themselves.

  I went first to the bank with my father’s will and all of my identification. The bank manager did not want to hear my story. He was florid and sweaty, weary of native heat and demands. “Of course, of course… sign here,” he said. He tossed me a bundle of my father’s money and a tattered stack of checks he guaranteed would be useless in the Toledo District.

  In a stinking hot bathroom lurid with graffiti, I peeled off my stockings, unbuttoned the top button of my blouse, squeezed and flexed my toes. Barefoot I ambled into a nearby park and sat on a concrete bench grilled by the sun. The heat here was something you could chew on and digest. It had been winter at home, and now all of my pores opened and took deep gulps of air.

  “An ai seh,” a man in an orange shirt explained in pidgin to a man in a red shirt, “Da jes de sehm alwas jes deh sehm.”

  A stack of crates with two wheels approached, revealing itself as a bicycle stacked several feet high with a conglomeration of bird cages. A woman in a blue terry dress and red sandals pushed her teetering cargo along, while a score of tiny rainbow hued birds tittered and squeaked together to the tune of the song the woman whistled through plump purple lips.

  A small brown boy had stacked pyramids of mangoes in groups of five at different levels, cool sweet hills topped with sunshine. I handed him a vivid bill, painted currency. “I had a friend once that used to carve these into shapes. “ I told him. “He was a boy just like you.”

  “Yes’em,” he showed a gap between his paper white teeth. “Da gud like dat.”

  I peeled my fruit in short inexpert chunks, sucked on the flesh, nibbled around the hirsute stone while I watched the swing bridge lift and open to allow the sailboats to skim out to sea. I wiped my sticky hands on my skirt. No one noticed or cared.

  Restless, I returned to the cave of my room, lay back and watched the fan tinka-tinka-tinka ove
rhead while flies chased the spokes. I rose only to drink warm sour water from the tap before crawling naked between clammy sheets. I slept as deep as the past and woke with my dreams as close and touchable as the southern stars.

  Breakfast was a hunk of fresh bread and scalding bitter coffee smutted with molasses and milk. I carried my cup to the lobby searching for someone that would drive me all the way to Monkey River. I discovered Pierre trying to catch cool air and drum up business of any sort he could muster. He wore a Yankees baseball cap, brown shorts, and no shirt, and carried a sign which read: Ai name Pierre. Ai cheep. Ai relyble. Ai nyce gai wit saf automobile. Someone must have helped him to spell the last word. There was an openness in his mercurial face. His sandals were too big and they flopped around his thick brown toes and hambone ankles like loose snowshoes.

  His car was white with a red interior, like the carcass of an animal. I sat in its belly moving between springs and sharp rips in the naugahyde as we bounced down the rutted dirt track of the Southern Highway, named by someone with delusions of grandeur.

  “So ju gon be banana man.” Pierre shifted gears, the engine ground its molars. “Dem bananas make gud fruits, but da tran-tulas live in dem.”

  “Spiders you mean?”

  “Noh de furry…got to be mammals fu suh ten.”

  The jungle slid past the window, deeper, greener, more sinister and secretive than I remembered as a young girl when it had been all blue blues and green greens, lime jello studded with fruit.

  “Ju knowin’ how to grow de?”

  “Tarantulas?”

  “Banana, woman! Ju ever grow banana?”

  “I don’t even like to eat them.”

  He shook his head, made a sound like shoo! He twisted his baseball cap around from back to front, it revolved around his head, an emotional indicator. “Ju not do too gud as a farmer, fu chroo.”

  “I’ll find someone to help,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll figure something out.”

  “Well,” he gave his hat a violent twist. “Sometin’ll figger ju out. Dat fu chroo.”

  The house on its weathered stilts was empty, quiet and dark. The shuttered door had never been locked and I walked right in.

  Pierre stood on the threshold, my bags in his hand. “Dis noh’t right,” he said.

  “This is the place,” I said. “I just don’t think anybody’s been here since Est…since my father died.”

  “It feel like de somtin’ here ri’ nau.”

  “Ghosts you mean?”

  “Noh dis is sometin ju can touch.” He set my bags down. “Wha jugon’ do? Weh de lights and such?”

  “There’s a generator.” I pointed in the direction I remembered the noise coming from ten years ago.

  Pierre nodded and jumped out of the house back into the sun.

  Very little gave a clue about the man that had lived here. The tile floors were scuffed. The heavy wood furniture and its colored woven cushions were dusty. I knew I should pick up a mop and a broom and roll up my sleeves, but the shadows had already gotten to me, made me slow and muddled.

  In the bedrooms the beds were stripped, the mattresses covered with a dust cloth. The mosquito nets hung limply. I found sheets in the closet folded into perfect squares, but moist and musty. I opened the shutters and chased dust motes out with my hand.

  Pierre found me out on the verandah spreading the sheets on the rails to air out. “Es noh good. De res noh gasso.”

  “Hmmm.” I wasn’t worried. Things would sort themselves out. In a place as verdant and overgrown as this everything had to exist in abundance.

  “Ef ju wan. Ai see to come back in de maanin’. Bring ju some gasso fu some dollars.”

  “Fantastic.” See, answers right away. “I’ll just get you some money.” I went back into the house, noticed that he remained outside. In the ice box I found warm Coca Cola. It was syrupy and thick and somehow made me thirstier, but for now it would have to do.

  Pierre took my money, studied it like tea leaves. “Ju wan ai stay tonigh’?” He reached for my cola though I hadn’t offered it to him. His fingers where they brushed mine were warm and dry.

  “I’ll be fine really. It’s all going to work out.”

  He drained the entire coke in one long swallow, the topaz marble of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Then he winked at me and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Maybe ju will be makin’ a good farmer… believin’ es all gon be jes fine.”

  The jungle sang all night. Lying in bed I could hear the distant roll and snap of the ocean whenever the birds held their breath. The trees slapped their palms against the side of the house in the breeze. The room was so dark it swallowed my eyes, gave me negative sight.

  I imagined that it was up to me to populate and bring light to this dark velvet place, that from me would spring all of mankind; bearing children, bearing fire, making weapons, learning to kill and survive. My mother had said that I was going to the ends of the earth. That night I realized I had arrived at the beginning.

  In the morning I wandered the house some more, opening drawers and cupboards. My father’s clothes hung patiently in neat rows. I crumpled them in my hands, held the long sleeved shirts up to my nose searching for a hint of him, for pipe smoke or sweat, or the loam of the earth, the earth he had worked his entire life until his eyes were speckled with brown as though the ground had found its way into them.

  I met Estevan the summer I was fourteen. My mother had decided I needed to know him, and brought us to the plantation, to this banana republic too hot for stockings and decency, where the ocean air and the scent of mangoes had seduced her and my father years before and conceived me. Reunited they were reduced to two middle-aged strangers stewing around the house, diplomats trying to solve a difficult international problem, while I ran barefoot with a native boy, swimming almost naked in water as clear as babies’ eyes.

  I remembered only one conversation with him. He found me on the veranda and asked me to take a walk.

  We followed a trail that ran circuitous to the house, a trail made simply for the pleasure of walking without the intention of getting anywhere.

  My father said, “You and your mother are leaving tomorrow. I have business to take care of.” He absently plucked a leaf from a nearby plant and rolled it into a little ball. “You can go back to your friends and swim in a real pool.”

  “I like the lagoons.”

  I tried to imagine how I might repair things between him and my mother in the coming night; how I could undo all the bad stitches they had bungled on their own. I wanted to stay in this place with its sweet sticky air and my brown Julián.

  My father glanced at the path behind us. “What was that?”

  I turned around and studied our footprints, the waving branches. Something hit my ankle, and when I turned a scatter of silver coins winked in the sun on the path between us. In a sweet sing-song voice he said, “Now where did that come from?”

  I picked up one of the coins, still warm from his pocket, embossed with a picture of a bird. I turned it around in my hand the way Julián tumbled stones. I looked straight into Estevan’s face. “I’m not a little girl anymore,” I told him. “You missed that part.”

  He took two steps toward me, walking right over the money he had flung. He laid his hand on my hair, a warm brown cloud resting on my head. “Don’t turn out like your mother,” he said. “There is a wider world.”

  I ran out through the banana fields, past the mangoes, and into the woods. I found Julián by the hibiscus waiting for me.

  “I’m leaving!”

  He held me close to his thin heaving chest, each rib as delicate as a branch.

  I kissed him with my fierce unpruned passion, my teeth bit his lip. “I will always love you,” I promised him. I was fourteen, I still believed in always.

  He reached behind him and picked a flower which he tucked behind my ear as he ran his fingers over my face and traced my lips. “Isabei,” he had whispered using the island form o
f my name, “I will be here waiting for you if you ever come back.”

  Mother blamed me for our hasty departure. I accepted that blame to save her from disgrace, to give her an alternative story if she needed one. She packed our bags with her mouth set in a firm grim line that would linger there the rest of her life.

  Memories clotted the air of the house loaded and charged it until I was driven out into the sunshine to wander the banana fields where the stalks were drooping with untended fruit. Leaping and jumping I managed to pick a banana that was starchy, and bland, and completely unpalatable. I spit it out right in front of Pierre’s thick brown toes as they appeared on the ground in front of me.

  “Oh!”

  “De not any gud like dat,” he said. He was wearing a shirt today festooned with tropical flowers. “De got to ripen off de branch.”

  “Well that’s silly.”

  “Ju shuh noh banana farmer girl. Not even knowin’ how tu eat de.” He held up a net bag. “Ai bring ju bread fresh from Monkey River and some gasso fu ju machine.”

  I tossed the uneaten banana over my shoulder and followed him back to the house.

  I was holding the bread with both hands and biting off ravenous chunks of it when the girl arrived. She walked right into the kitchen, put her basket on the counter, and faced me. Pierre tipped his hat and leaned against the doorframe.

  “I’m Matilde,” she said.

  “Hello,” I marfled around the bread in my mouth.

  She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She was slender and barefoot with a wide face and long fingers. She wore a dingy white blouse and a skirt the color of orchids. Her shoulder came maybe six inches above the counter. Her toenails were meticulously clean even though she had walked through the dirt to get here.

  “I’ve been sent from the town to take care of your house.” Her English was almost perfect, with a strange lilting accent and occasional drifting tangents into pidgin.

  “Are you my father’s usual house keeper?”

  “Mr. Estevan died,” she said by way of explanation.