Tropic of Night (2 page)

After Kmart, we drove to the Winn-Dixie, where I now shop. I used to eat so little that it wasn’t worth going to the supermarket and I’d just pick up something, yogurt, or chicken, or soup, at a convenience store. That’s where I found the child, in a mini-mart on the east side of Dixie Highway, down south someplace. I forget what I was doing there, but sometimes, at night, in the summer, the sticky heat and the insect noises remind me of Africa, and I have to ride, to hear the mechanical sounds of driving and smell exhaust, the dear stench of my homeland, and feel the wind of speed on my face. At around two in the morning, I went in to get a cold drink and she was there, filthy, in ragged shorts and a torn pink T-shirt and flip-flops, standing in the aisle. She was shaking.

I said to her, “Are you okay? Are you lost?” She didn’t answer. The woman behind the counter was fussing with the frozen slush machine and had her back turned. I walked away to the drink console.

As I reached for a cup, I heard the first slap and looked around. The mother was there, a large tan woman in her twenties, with her hair in curlers under a green print scarf. She was wearing Bermudas and a tube top that barely covered her bobbling breasts. Whoever she had once been, that person was gone, or in deep hiding, and only a demon stared out of the red-rimmed eyes. The child was holding her hand to her ear, and her face was screwed up like a piece of crumpled tinfoil, but she made no sound.

“What did I tell you? Huh?” said the mother. She held a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor in one hand. With the other she beat the child, big roundhouse blows that knocked the little girl against a frozen-food lowboy hard enough to bounce.

“What did I tell you, you stupid little bitch? Huh? (Slap.) Huh? Did I tell you not to move? (Slap.) I told you not to move, didn’t I? (Slap.) Wait’ll I get you back home, I’ll fix you good. (Slap.) What the fuck you lookin’ at, bitch?”

This last was directed at me. I pulled my eyes away from the scene and left. I stood with my cold hands pressed to the warm hood of my car and took deep breaths. I thought of what the Olo say, of something that happens between an adult and a particular child, part of their weird rearing practices. But that was in Africa, I told myself. I tried hard to shut down the feeling.

I heard the door of the mini-mart slam open and the mother and her child emerged and walked toward the corner of the little building. There was a dark alley there that led to the next street, where I supposed they lived. It was a typical South Dade highway-side neighborhood, small concrete-block stucco houses, a few low apartment buildings, still looking bare and exposed after Hurricane Andrew. The woman was holding her forty-ounce beer bottles slung over her wrist in their plastic carrier bag, and was dragging the child along by the arm, twisting it cruelly, muttering to herself. The child was trying to relieve the pain by turning herself toward the woman and in the process, just as they passed into the alley, the girl got in the way of the woman’s legs and she tripped. They both went down on the rough limestone gravel. The woman saved her bottles and let the girl fall on her back. Then the mother yelled out a curse and got to her feet and kicked the girl in the side. The girl curled up into fetal position and covered her head with her pipe-cleaner arms, whereupon I ran up to them yelling, “Stop that!”

The woman turned and glowered at me. “Get the fuck outa here, bitch! Mind your own fuckin’ business.” I moved closer and I could smell the sweat and the alcohol boiling off her.

“Please. Let her alone,” I said, and she took two staggering steps toward me and launched a clumsy overhand blow at my head.

I caught her arm in hiki-taoshi and brought it around behind her back, ude-hineri, and bent her over double and marched her a few yards away and pressed her face into the gravel. I had not done any serious aikido in years but it turned out to be something you don’t forget how to do, like riding a bike. I said, “Stay here, please, I’m going to see if your little girl is all right.” And I rose and walked back to where the child lay unmoving.

I suppose I was on autopilot by then, in some kind of trance from the African thing that was happening, which is not all that uncommon among the Olo, but still unexpected in a South Dade mini-mart, and that is the only excuse for what I did next. The mother did not stay put but came after me in drunken rage, cursing, and I whipped around and caught her left wrist and spun her out in jodan-aigamae-nagewaza . In aikido dojos, subjects of this throw go easily into a forward roll to their right and bounce up smiling; but now, in the dark alley, the woman’s 160 or so pounds were lofted at speed through the night with the force of her own charge, and her head struck the corner of the Dumpster parked there with a dreadful, final sound.

Thick blood poured from an angular dent in her head, and a dark stain was spreading along the center seam of her Bermudas. She was as still as the loaded trash bags that surrounded her. I did not check to see if she was as dead as she appeared, but went to the child and took her hand. She came willingly with me and we got in my car and rolled. As I drove, I looked back into the sickly light of the mini-mart window and saw that the proprietor was still messing with the disassembled pieces of her slush machine. She had never looked at me. I had touched nothing in the store. I asked the child what her name was, but she didn’t answer. By the time we passed Dadeland, she was asleep.

I learned what her name was the next morning in the Miami Herald, a four-inch story on the first page of the Metro section. Mureena Davis, twenty-six, had died in an alley behind a mini-mart at 14230 Dixie Highway. The police believed that she had stumbled while drunk and struck her head, fracturing her skull and breaking her neck. Death was instantaneous. Ms. Davis, a single mother, had no relatives in the area, having lately arrived from Imokalee, and lived alone in an apartment near the scene. Authorities were concerned about the woman’s daughter, Luz, age four, who was seen in the mini-mart moments before the accident by Mrs. Ellen Kim, the clerk on duty. A police search of the immediate area was unsuccessful. Anyone having any information about the child is urged to call …

No mention of a mysterious skinny white lady at the scene. And after that, nothing. Something like a million children disappear every year in this country, all but a tiny fraction either runaway teens or divorce snatches. Except where there is clear evidence of foul play, most urban police departments treat these cases with the attention they give to littering the pavement. I think we are safe for the moment. From the authorities, I mean. Not safe safe, no.

At the Winn-Dixie, under the maddening lights, designed to put you in a trance and make all the food look more delicious than it will taste at home (“Trance States in the Supermarket: A Commercial Application of Shamanistic Technique,” possibly a paper there for someone; not me, though), we cruise the aisles, the child perched up on the basket seat, selecting nutritious foods. I have a good understanding of nutrition actually, since a female anthropologist will necessarily have much to do with women out in the field and the women universally feed the tribe. I talk to her in a low, comforting voice, discussing the various items and how they help us grow big and strong. She seems interested, if hesitant. I doubt she has much experience with conversation, and the visit to the mini-mart that I observed the night I met her was probably a typical shopping expedition. I let her smell the fruit. I open a package of ginger snaps and offer her one, which she shyly accepts and eats, with a deliberation that is painful to watch. We buy a lot of fruit and vegetables, rice, bread, cookies, cereals, milk, butter, cheese, ice cream, red beans, peanut butter, strawberry jam, mayonnaise, eggs, and a piece of snapper I will broil tonight, perhaps with a baked potato and a salad, with ice cream for dessert. Maybe I will even keep some of it down. No meat, though, nothing so red.

She doesn’t respond when I babble, nor repeat the names of the various foodstuffs I name, nor does she point and make demands as I observe the other children doing. She watches, however; her senses are alert. I tell myself she’s a member of a tiny subculture of Americans, one in which the parents murder their children, usually before the age of five, and so I can’t really expect her to respond as these others do, any more than I would expect an adopted Korean child to speak English right away or use a fork.

We pay for the food, $94.86, which seems like a lot, and is probably more than I used to spend on food in six months. The checkout clerk is a man and is not interested in cute little girls; a good thing to remember?avoid motherly-seeming checkers.

Back at our place, I stow away the foods, I cook, we eat. She stays with me while I prepare the meal, watching, on a chair. Since I took her, we have not been out of sight of each other. We even leave the bathroom door open. A bit like life in an African village. I cut up her fish and squoosh her potato up with butter and salt. She seems unfamiliar with any implement other than a spoon. I suspect finger foods and cereal have constituted the bulk of her diet, when she got a diet at all. I demonstrate the use of the fork, and she imitates me. She eats slowly and finishes every bit on her plate. Ice cream seems to be a revelation. She finishes a scoop, and when I ask her if she wants more, she nods solemnly.

After dinner, I wash up and I place her on a chair and show her how to dry and put the dishes on the wooden dish rack. While I wash, I sing a little song the Olo women sing when they pound karite nuts. The words are quite naughty, as might be expected in a song associated with a process that involves thrusting a long thick pestle into a deep mortar about a million times. It has an almost infinite number of verses; I suppose I learned a few hundred in my time there. I often run through them in my head at work, as I have found nothing better to pass the time during a necessary but tedious occupation. I work as a medical records clerk, a job that compares in many ways to pounding karite nuts.

The child drops a cup on the floor with a clatter. I stoop to retrieve it and I see that she has thrown her arms over her head and is cringing, bent-kneed, awaiting the blow. I approach her carefully, speaking softly. I tell her it doesn’t matter, it’s just a cup, the handle has broken off, but we can use it as a flowerpot. I rummage an avocado pit from the trash and suspend it by toothpicks in the cup. I let her fill the cup with water. I describe how the new avocado tree will grow, and how it will be her tree. She lets me stroke her hair and hug her, although she’s stiff in my arms, like a store mannequin.

There is a scratching at the door. I open it and Jake strolls in, as if he owns the place, which in a sense he does. I put the broiling pan on the floor and he licks the fish grease out of it and then goes over to the child and licks her hands and face. She grins. This is the only situation in which she smiles, a tiny sunrise. I get out a ginger snap and give it to her. She feeds Jake. I kneel down beside the two of them and hug Jake and the child together.

Enough of that. I finish the dishes while Jake tries to teach the girl how to play. Jake is a German shepherd—golden retriever mutt, one of several miscellaneous beasts supported by my landlady, who lives with her two kids in the house of which my garage is an outbuilding. Her name is Polly Ribera. She is a fabric artist and designer. The house is a divorce settlement from Mr. Ribera, who lives in L.A. and never appears. He is something in media. We are cordial, but not friends. Polly believes everyone can improve themselves, starting by listening to her advice, and she was put off when I did not welcome her attention. I pay my rent on the first of the month and fix what breaks in my apartment and am very, very quiet, so she is glad to have me as a tenant. She thinks I am a sad case, like the abandoned animals she shelters. When we happen to pass, or when I come to pay my rent, she tries to cheer me up a little, for she thinks my problem is men. That is her problem. She makes risqué comments, and I pretend to be flustered and she laughs and says, “Oh, Dolores!”

Dolores Tuoey is the name I go by now. Dolores was a real person, a good Catholic girl, an American Sister of Mercy who came to Mali to do good and did good, but contracted cerebral malaria and died of it. They put her next to me in the hospital in Bamako and when they packed me up to ship me back to the States, someone grabbed her papers by mistake and stuck them in with my stuff. So when I needed to be someone else fast I became Dolores, still a good Catholic girl, no longer a nun, of course, but that explains the big blanks in the résumé, and the little problems with dress and makeup. I can talk the talk all right, having been for a long time a good Catholic girl myself. A little problem there, explaining Luz to Polly. What a good liar I am! That’s why I left the order, of course, succumbed to a dark deceiver out there, and have been trying to get the child back since. It all works out, if you don’t bang the box too hard and if I can phony up the paperwork. A sister of mercy indeed, Dolores.

My real name is Jane Doe.

No, not a joke. My family has little imagination and substantial pride. Like the perhaps apocryphal Mr. Hogg, the Texas oil baron who named his daughters Ura and Ima, my father simply would not see that Jane Doe is the traditional name for an unidentified female corpse. The Does have a small store of female names that they recycle through the generations: Mary, Elizabeth, Jane, Clare. My paternal grandmother was Elizabeth Jane, and had four sons, and so I as the firstborn daughter had to be Jane Clare, as my sister had to be Mary Elizabeth. My late sister.

I chase Jake out as night falls in the disturbing light-switch way of the tropics, disturbing to me, at least, raised as I was with the long summer twilights of the high latitudes. We amuse ourselves, Luz and I, at our table, by the light of our paper moon. She draws with Magic Markers on a big newsprint pad, complicated scribbles, densely laid on, filling the whole page. I ask her what she’s drawing, but she doesn’t answer. I’ve set up an old Underwood I got down at the Goodwill. On it, I’m carefully forging a birth certificate on a Malian form. That was in Dolores’s stuff, too. A neat packet of birth certificates, and one of death certificates. She was a nurse-midwife, riding the bush circuit. I’ve kept them in my hidey-hole these past years, for no particular reason, and now here I am tapping out a saving fiction. Thank you again, Dolores.