Bay of Souls (16 page)

"No?"

"You know," he said when they had left the road and were struggling along rainforest track, "we also have a reputation for
not
moving drugs. At least we used to. We're in the arts business primarily. People ask us about emeralds."

When the quick darkness fell, the drums began.

"I'm hopeful, you know," Lara said. "I have a blessing and I'm determined that nothing go wrong."

Manhandling the wheel, Roger glanced over at her and smiled.

"What?" she asked.

The drums were louder and closer. They heard the ogan, the metal roarer, lay down a commanding beat and the other drums fell into line around its tempo.

"You're so like him."

"Ah," she said happily. "Twins in the mysteries."

"I hope nothing goes wrong," Roger said. "I hope you see him."

T
HE PILOT
was a Colombian-born Basque named Soto. Until learning to fly a few years before, he had been partners with his brother in a wholesale electronics business. The business had thrived but he had found the life boring.

As darkness came down on the mountains, he stood by the wooden benches outside the lodge, smoking, listening to the drums. He knew Lara slightly from the short deadhead flight down from Vieques. He had delivered a new plane from the dealer, a lovely Beechcraft that pleased him, evoking Bogey and Ilsa at the Casablanca airport. The plane that he would fly north was fueling on the edge of the canefields surrounded by armed men. Colombians and other off-islanders had replaced the local security, in which the higher-ups were losing confidence. It was a good plane, a Cessna 185 taildragger of the sort useful for rough-and-ready takeoffs and landings, worked on that morning by an expatriate Cuban mechanic who had a little cigarette and rum factory outside town.

"Sit if you like," Lara told the pilot. She was preparing herself for the ceremony that was under way in the
hounfor
and she had been trying to stay out of his way. The sound of the drums had brought him over. He looked from the drummers toward the ruinous lodge building.

"It's strange, this."

She shrugged. He took out a pack of cigarettes and offered the opened pack to her. She declined.

It was strange there even to those who had seen a great deal. The lodge was a nineteenth-century building of stucco and brick, with a tall steeple and three Ionic columns in front. Above the formal entryway were painted the
vevers
of the gods around the Masonic square and compass. It stood in what was now an abandoned village of Haitian-style thatched houses. The canefields around it had been cut back to provide a grassy landing strip, at the far end of which was a low tin-roofed machine shop, painted in camouflage colors.

"It's how it is here," she told him.

The
hounfor,
the temple where they would reclaim John-Paul Purcell, was pitched against one wall of the lodge building. It was constructed of leaves and branches. At its center, running from the earth floor to the thatched roof, was a wind-twisted snakelike pole called the
poto mitan,
representing the serpent of wisdom, Dambala, whose sinuous form connected earth and heaven.

The pilot gave her a knowing grin. She had no idea what the look conveyed. Some kind of grim complicity, taking no comfort and expecting none in return.

"
Buena suerte,
" she said, smiling.

He was flying north this time. Roger had decided to send everything out before the island dissolved in chaos, with the Americans and their friends closing down airspace.

From the
hounfor,
Lara recognized the words of the rosary in Creole, sung against the iron meter of the ogan, a plow beaten into sounding shape. The opening of the prayers to the Virgin were chanted by the
mambo,
a market woman by day, priestess of the night now. As the crowd chanted the response, the beat of the
seconde
took up its place in the prayer.

From across the field, she watched the pilot toss his final cigarette and cross himself. She had seen the boarding gesture many times before in that part of the world, and she rather adored it—the operatic heroism of certain of the pilots, lean solitaries in the inimitable Spanish mode. Though they always seemed to toss the cigarette at the nearest fuel line, their blessing enclosed a small moment of humility before they mounted and went forth. The Yankee pilots did it differently: their heroic model was Chuck Yeager, their style was conventional—another day, another dollar.

The Cessna taxied out to rising drums, turned and headed for the dark horizon. Two burning barrels marked the end of his runway. He cleared them and disappeared.

Then the drums seemed to stop. She turned to the
hounfor
and saw the people as they turned toward her. The dancers had slowed to the iron beat of the ogan. The
mambo
called to her softly.

"Madame." Fires burned before the ascending serpent.

The ceremony for John-Paul was called in Creole
wete mo danba dlo.
She had never heard it referred to in English. In French it was
retirer les morts d'en bas de l'eau.
Its purpose was to call back the souls of the dead from Guinee, bring them back safely to a place of honor and to the aid of the living. One side of the temple consisted of rows of painted, inlaid jars in the brightest colors, the
govi
that would contain the
ti bon ange
of the reclaimed dead. Lara thought of it as her last chance to address her brother's restless spirit, and through him to regain her own soul.

"Madame Lara."

Lara went across the field to the
hounfor,
passed between the fires and stood by the
poto mitan.
The
mambo
fixed her with a steady stare as though willing her to understand more than could be said. She spoke in a Creole so accented that Lara could hardly make it out, a language different from that which she spoke every Tuesday and Thursday in the market. One of the servants from the hotel translated for her.

"Only the rosary tonight. Mr. John-Paul he is not coming. Not this night."

"Why?" Lara asked, addressing herself to the
mambo
.

"You will ask him tomorrow. He will come tomorrow night."

"Is there trouble?"

The
mambo
kept her in the beam of that unbroken stare for a moment and then took Lara's hand.

"No trouble," the old servant said, although the
mambo
had not spoken. "A good rosary tonight. Tomorrow a good passage."

Roger drove them back to the family house on the shore, a few kilometers south of the hotel grounds.

"It happens," Roger told her as they drove through the scrub. "You know John-Paul. Always the contrarian. You'll have to pay for another
retirer les morts.
"

"Everything seemed right," Lara said.

Back at the house, Roger had a drink and Lara kept him company.

"Do you know more than you're telling me, Rog? If this was the date for it, why didn't they follow through?"

"Because it's dangerous."

"Why dangerous?"

"Dangerous to the
ti bon ange.
To John-Paul's soul." He seemed abstracted. He followed his rum with a second. "You know he has to be brought out of the sea. Out of Guinee. The soul is vulnerable in transit." He laughed and shook the ice in his drink.

"Why are you laughing, Roger?"

"I'm thinking of him there, Lara. I loved him. I'm not really laughing."

She watched him. He did seem to be laughing but she decided to take his word for it.

"The soul outside the body is always in danger," he told her. "Every religion says so. Now and at the hour of our death? The time of passage draws the enemies of the soul."

Lara thought of her own soul that must be out there as well, under the reef.

"Some Colombians are coming," Roger said. "I was really supposed to wait for their OK."

"I'm sure they'll approve."

Roger refilled his drink.

"They're sending down Hilda Bofil. A definite pain in the privates. Very contentious woman."

"Roger," Lara said, "I'm sorry we got in the way of all this. You understand why I had to come."

Roger looked at her for a long moment and finished his drink.

"Sure, baby." He stood up and kissed her and went outside to the car.

Out over the ocean, the first devil came with a change in the color of darkness. The swell of the mountains fell away and the phosphorescent glimmer of the inshore bay spread out beneath him. Ahead was the monochrome presentation of the sea, without forgiveness. A towering black cloud rose above the island, snake-shaped. When the engine began to cough, his instrument lights flickered. When they settled down, he saw the manifold gauge flat and dark.

A failure of information, Soto thought, unknown things. Beautiful machine, what troubles thee? The devil.

When he moved the throttle forward and felt the machine dying in his arms, he tried to put her in a turn. Proclaimed by the dead instruments, the plane was enfolded in ignorance, a random object awkwardly placed in the sky. And he was another random object, aloft and stripped of power, afloat in silence as in the old dream of flying. The bad one.

He thought: The water! If it had been left unguarded, contaminated! Water, such a simple thing. He closed his eyes and put his arm across his face.

Two shrimpers working between reefs saw him hit and go down fast. There had been the usual calm engine noise of an ascending plane, then silence, and out of the silent fall the crash, a great violence of sundered metal connections, hissing, steam, a series of whirlpools seeming to set each other off. Shrimp vanished. The fishermen would swear they felt the shear of the plane's wings.

After Roger left, she could not sleep. For one thing, the drums did not stop when the ceremony ended; the sound of the rosary in the distance shifted into Creole, singing honor to the gods.

Now that she had seen the temple at the lodge again, the
govi
jars in which spirits were conveyed, she could not get the pictures out of her mind. She thought of her own soul, larvalike, breathing to the undersea rhythms. To meet one's soul again, what would that be like? She imagined it as a judgment. I see myself in the mirror but my thoughts throw no reflection. My words cast no shadows, she thought. She imagined her present self as composed of two dimensions: an agent of influence, a professor of lies. Tomorrow she would be her former self, whoever that had been. Her eyes would change.

Suddenly she missed Michael. It had been folly to bring him but it was what she had wanted, that he see what would happen to her, that he be nearby. Then they would truly be bound. They would begin again. Because his situation was so like hers, the two of them together were no accident.

She began wandering naked through the rooms with a flashlight, then, hearing servants somewhere in the house, she put on a terrycloth robe. For a moment she thought she heard rain on the leaves outside, but it was only the wind rattling kapok branches against a metal roof.

She went along the second-floor patio hallway to John-Paul's room. The door was unlocked; she pushed it open and played her beam on the
vevers
painted on the walls and on the inlaid chests stacked on the floor. She moved the circle of light into the corners of the room. There were drawings she had not seen before, even woven
vevers
of gods she did not know. None of it had been there the last time she had seen his bedroom. It was as though someone had devised a secret wake in the room where he had died. Around the windows and on top of the framed pictures on the walls were branches of a plant she did not recognize, fragrant with a biting, musky smell.

Farther along, her beam fixed on glowing eyes. A man crouched in one corner of the room. He looked excited, he smiled. Perhaps only guilty and surprised. When he stood up she recognized him as a man named Armand. He had been a boat builder and worked as a handyman at the
habitation.

"Madame," he said, laughing.

She thought he seemed unsound. She had always known him to be a sensible man who was said to be a Jehovah's Witness.

"What's this?" she asked him, pointing to the strange
vevers.

"
Bizango,
" he said, his smile draining away.

It was a word one rarely heard, the name of a secret society to which John-Paul was said to belong. People feared it. She wondered if her soul in Marinette's custody had any connection with
bizango.

"But Armand. You didn't put these here?"

"No, madame," the old man said.

Outside, a vehicle pulled up in front of the house. She went to the balcony rail and shone her light behind the headlights. Roger Hyde was driving one of the camouflage jeeps from the lodge. There were two white men in the rear seat, in uniforms that matched the jeep's coloration. She thought they must be Colombian
milicianos.
They did not care to be illuminated; they shouted at her until she moved the beam away. One pointed his weapon. She shut off the light and heard Roger coming up the outside stairway, moving more quickly than was his custom.

"Lara?"

"I'm here, Roger. What's wrong?"

He took her hand.

"Be cool, sweetheart. We lost the plane. It went down over the reef."

"Oh my God. Oh Roger." She put a hand to her face. "And the pilot?"

"The pilot bought it, poor guy," Roger said. "And poor us because the Colombians are here from Rodney. They're not happy."

"But they can't blame us."

Roger smiled unhappily. "They have to blame someone, Lara."

"Do we have to go to the lodge?"

"They want us at the lodge. It's going to be difficult. The woman they sent is very"—he shrugged—"difficult." He was more upset than she ever remembered him being.

While they were driving to the lodge, veering onto the shoulder, dodging holes in the road, dodging the talus around them, she asked, "Roger, you must tell me about
bizango.
"