The Font of All Mojo

Andy and Skeezix and I couldn’t decide if Mojo was lying to us or not.

We were ensconced in a Technicolor tiki bar in Copper Hill, Tennessee. At our table the Mai-Tais bubbled and smoked like volcano cones and the roast pig sizzled in rumfire. Conga drumming and slack-key guitar vied with the hissing of the surf, or at least the hissing of the cheap speakers hanging above the bar. The sun had set behind the Appalachians after a hard day’s play, and we weary whitewater kayakers had come here to lounge underneath the plastic palms and tell lies.

But was Mojo really lying? He’d shown up at the river that morning with a new pickup and a new kayak and sundry other accessories, stuff that must have set him back ten grand or more, but now, over drinks, his story about how he’d acquired this shiny swag just wasn’t holding water.

Mojo was holding a lot of liquid himself that night, but none of it was water either. He leaned forward, wavered, and braced himself on the table with his palm. “Well, I was asleep and I heard an explosion,” he said. “’Bout three weeks ago. And I ran out to my living room…buck naked, mindja…and what I found was—”

His voice was thick and fuzzy. He’d found a smoldering crater in the floor, that’s what, and other peculiarities. His old water bottle was embedded in the ceiling, his TV was gone from its pedestal, and all the glass was shattered out of his living room window. What the hell?

He peered through the window’s splintered frame and saw a greasy yellow fire flickering in the parking lot, right where he’d left his old Vega.

Mojo hopped up and batted the water bottle down from the ceiling. It was one of those standard-issue blue jobs, with hash marks up the sides indicating fluid ounces and milliliters, but damn! it was hot. The bottom was still thick and gooey, blobby from some great and terrible heat.

He dropped it and bolted out the door, hoping he was in time. But his Vega was as fricasseed as a blazing Bonze; the cleansing fires had sent it home to meet its Buddha. Mojo was jabbering and cursing his water bottle and dancing back and forth on the melting pavement when the firemen and cops arrived to douse the Vega’s carcass.

“I got dressed after they took the cuffs off me, and the arson investigator and I figured it all out.” He looked up as the waiter arrived at our table with an enormous ceramic skull, brim-full of fruity poison. A Zombie, the house specialty. “Grassy-ass,” Mojo said as he took it. The waiter flourished a Zippo and a blue flame blossomed atop the concoction in the skull.

Mojo grinned. “That there is what my Vega looked like.” He puffed the drink out, and we all jabbed our straws in and slurped.

He got the story out between sips and gasps. “The TV got het up and melted the bottom outta that water bottle and what was inside it zizzed the TV. Shorted out the whole thing. Blew that TV clean through the window. And it landed on my windshield.

“Some kinda gizmo, maybe the pitcher tube, lit the upholstery on fire and the car went up. I’d just loaded it up with my boat and stuff the night before, so that all got burnt too. Funny thing is, the insurance company almost wouldn’t pay. Asked me was I using the water bottle in a manner consistent with its instructions. I mean, hell, there wasn’t that much vodka in it.” He shook his head, took a mighty pull on his straw, and looked around at us. “Lucky, eh?”

Skeezix leaned back and threw up his hands. “Lucky? Mojo, I wouldn’t take your luck if you threw in the Coors twins. That TV could have blown through your wall and burned you in your bed. Man, I’m not even sure I should sit at the same table with you and your poison karma.”

A sly smile slid across Mojo’s face. “Oh, but I got the mojo laundry now. Yessir, I shouldn’t wonder if Ed McMahon pulls up in his double-wide any old day now. You oughtta see what I brung—” and with that he passed out straight over backwards in a clatter of chopsticks without finishing his story.

Some luck.

Mojo’s demise pretty much ended dinner. We gathered him and his things. I wound up standing at the table with the check in one hand and Mojo’s new water bottle in the other, while Andy and Skeezix hustled Mojo outside.

His water bottle was unlike any I’d ever seen. It fit the décor of the bar perfectly, for it was a red plastic tiki head, grinning horribly. The War God or some such tabu thing, straight from the Brady Bunch’s vacation. I shook it; it was empty.

But there was still about three inches of Zombie in that big skull on the table, and on impulse I unscrewed the War God and emptied the skull straight into it, fruit slices and all, filling it half-full of rum and absinthe and whatnot. The War God seemed to grin even wider, as if relishing his new payload. I shivered. Was this thing the cure-all Mojo was talking about? Or just the latest of Mojo’s ills?

The next morning I was first up. Andy and Skeezix soon followed, and upon being kicked, Mojo. He looked a mess, no more pretty than that tiki-head bottle of his, but coffee and bacon revived him. Shortly after sunrise we broke camp and headed for the Ocoee River, at the heart of the Cherokee National Forest in East Tennessee.

I was driving Mojo’s new truck, and I admit I was speeding. I was eager to play in the rapids and Mojo needed to get to a bathroom, or at least an outhouse or a bush or even somebody’s hat. So when I saw the lights in the mirror I looked down at the odometer and my spleen fell out, splat. Twenty-eight miles an hour over the limit. I slowed and crunched onto the shoulder.

The tall khaki-clad Park Ranger ambled up. When I rolled down the window he wrinkled his nose immediately. “It’s eight-thirty in the ayy emm, and you boys are drinkin’ already?” He craned his neck to see past me into the passenger’s seat, where Mojo was slumped in boneless discombobulation. His lip curled. “Step out of the car, please sir. And tell your friend not to move. Not that he can, I reckon.”

Now we may have been speeding, but I categorically deny we were drinking. Even so, I had forgotten that the Park Rangers at the Ocoee River have, as of late, grown downright intolerant of deviants. And any old deviants at all will do.

While the Ranger had me balancing on one leg and touching my nose with one elbow and reciting the presidents of the United States backwards, I took a moment to look back up the road. Skeezix and Andy were watching my humiliation through Skeezix’s windshield. They were trying to stifle it, but I could tell they were far gone in laughter at my predicament. Oh, they’d pay. Soon as I had.

Presently the Ranger gave it up. “OK, you pass,” he muttered. “But your vehicle reeks of booze and I want to see what you’re carryin’. Possession of alcoholic beverages in a National Forest is punishable by a five-hunnerd dollar fine. Turn it out, boys!”

My liver fell out and plooped on the pavement beside my spleen. Mojo’s tiki bottle, the War God, was full of the most potent boom-boom ever distilled in the equatorial belt. I’d poured it in there myself. And I might as well forget about refusing the search; Mojo’s paint-melting aroma was enough probable cause for the Ranger to have us dissected with little truck stop butterknives, if he chose.

So I roused Mojo and he helped me unload the truck under the Ranger’s eye. As gawkers motored by we unrolled the sleeping bags and emptied the food box and shook out the tents. The Ranger poked and sniffed and—stupidly, I thought— even got down on his hands and knees to inspect the undercarriage. When he was through he squared his shoulders and clapped the dust from his hands and got out his little book.

“Well, if there’s alcohol in this truck, I can’t find it. I guess ya’ll drank it all last night. So all I’m gonna do is write you for…ah-HA!” he exclaimed suddenly, pointing at Mojo.

Mojo was standing on the shoulder behaving himself, but he had the War God in his hand and he was chugging its contents as fast as his Adam’s Apple would bob.

“Put that bottle down and step back from it!” the Ranger ordered, thrusting his finger directly into Mojo’s chest. “I knew you boys was holdin’.”

Mojo choked and sprayed a fine mist into the Ranger’s face.

“Oh, Lord, that stinks,” the Ranger cried. He wiped his face angrily and seized the War God from Mojo’s hands and held it up to the sun so he could examine its toothsome visage. “Reminds me of the ex-wife,” he spat, his face still red, and he finally sniffed its contents.

And sniffed them again. And again, as he contorted his features. When he tipped the bottle over, a stream of clear liquid poured out to spatter the gravel roadside.

“This is water!” he bellowed. “Not alcohol! Water!” He shoved the War God at Mojo.

“It’s a water bottle,” Mojo said. “Alcohol’d ruin it. You’d have to be a moron to put booze in one of them bottles. Trust me, I know.” He cut me a quick glance.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Only a jackass’d put booze in there.” Hee-haw, I thought.

The Ranger glared at us for a goodly while. Then he opened his mouth, allowed it to hang open, and slammed it closed again without speaking. He growled instead, low and throaty, and stomped back to his car without uttering another word.

When he was gone Andy and Skeezix climbed out of Skeezix’s truck. “What was that?” Andy asked.

I was in no mood to explain. I pounced on the War God the same as the Ranger had. The bottle smirked at me, leering with its oversized teeth, flaring nostrils, and slit eyes. I sniffed it. Sure enough, there wasn’t a solitary fume of rum to be whiffed.

I turned on Mojo. “Did you pour out that leftover Zombie that was in there? Or drink it this morning?”

His eyes grew wide. “What Zombie? There was never any Zombie in there.”

I stammered. “Mojo, I poured what was left from that big Zombie bowl we had last night into your water bottle. There was at least a pint of rum in there.” I looked in the direction the Ranger had gone. “Scot-free. He didn’t even write us a ticket.”

A look of understanding grew on Mojo. He reached for the War God. “Oh, I know what happened,” he cooed. “Come here, you. This tiki bottle’s got powers. Turned that likker into water, just like magic. I knew it’d change my luck.” He cradled the bottle like a newborn baby.

The War God grinned at us from Mojo’s arms, mysterious and merry.

“Screw you, War God,” I said to the bottle. “If you were really lucky, you’d be doing that little trick in reverse.”