Tropic of Night (25 page)

Two women, one of them the remarkable woman who had served us, pulled the girl to her feet, and the drums grew louder and more instant and a dozen or so devotees gathered into a rough dance line. The healer stood before Rosa, chanting, and anointing her with white powder and several liquids, one of them from an old Prell squeeze-bottle. He lit a clay bowl of some vegetable material, which gave off a sweet smoke. I asked Des what it was and he shushed me. Ibekwe blew smoke at the girl, and chanted some more; the dancers leaped and twirled, the drums pounded. This went on. My attention was fixed on the splendid woman. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, the energy she radiated, her authority was so very intense and attractive.

Then Rosa let out a high yell and stiffened. Her eyes rolled back into her head, showing only whites, and her neck twisted stiffly to the right. The drums fell silent, the dancers froze. Ibekwe was hunched over her, chanting, his face inches from hers. She was drooling thick saliva, like a dog; one of the women holding her wiped her chin with a cloth. Then came a softer drumming. Ibekwe stopped chanting and backed away. Rosa’s feet were beating rapidly on the packed earth; her head snapped back, her body bowed; she was in seizure now and the two women were having difficulty holding on to her. Other women jumped forward to help and we lost sight of her for some time. When we could observe her again, she was back on her litter, limp. The drummers and dancers wandered around, chatting, like players after a softball game in the park.

I asked Greer if the operation had been a success, he told me it was just the first stage, she’ll be here for weeks, getting deeper into trance states, & letting the orisha inhabit her more deeply each time. Eventually she’ll be consecrated to Ogun, like Maro. Here he pointed to the beautiful woman who’d helped hold the patient. He said she’d been brought in with encephalitis, also a Christian, also a hospital reject. She was essentially dead, and look at her now. I did and as I did she looked at me and smiled and I felt a jolt of some?I don’t know, some sexual energy. Very disturbing. Greer wanted to know what was wrong, said I looked like I was about to faint. All the excitement, I said, and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was blazing hot. He took me back into the house, where Ibekwe was sitting on a rope bed being cared for by some of his devotees, an old woman was bathing his face with a damp rag. Greer talked with him awhile and I stood around, feeling a little awkward as you do when attending a conversation between two people with a long history between them. The healer opened his eyes & looked at me & had conversation w/ Greer, clear they were talking about me. Des said, He says he’s got a busy schedule but as a favor to me he’ll try to fit you in. For what? He says you’re carrying a curse, Greer said. He says you’re cursed in your marriage bed.

Later in the car I tried to be all clinical about it, stupidly, really. What was really happening in the curing ceremony, talking about hysterical conversion and oh so interesting recent speculations about the connection between mental states and the immune system and Greer said, Yeah, I know all that, and the fact is, most traditional healers are charlatans, but Ibekwe isn’t, he really does it, and it’s outside the science zone, and so when I write about him, I’m going to have to fudge and do all that hand waving about the fucking immune system. Fact is, we know fuck-all about the immune system and its connection to the psyche. Ibekwe thinks he’s dealing on the psychic level, and we have no tools to study the psychic level because we don’t think it exists. We say weak effects, uncertain effects, no causality, small N, ergo not a fact. But it is a fact. Ibekwe turns a lot of people away, people he says he can’t help, and they mostly die, and the ones he helps get better.

Reflect later?a familiar experience, with that woman. I recall that jolt from somewhere?hair standing up on arms and neck, a tingling in the sexual parts, I thought my nipples were going to pop through my shirt. A déjŕ vu? I asked Greer who she was consecrated to and he said Oshun. The Yoruba Venus. Am a little frightened, also excited. Thinking of M. now, and Siberia, wishing I had more memory of what happened there, not just the events, but memory of the body.

For conventional pretty, Lisa Reilly was hard to beat, Paz thought, and she had the non-butter-melting look, too. Demure. She drove a red Saab 900 convertible, which made sense if you knew her the way Paz did. He glanced over at her from the driver’s seat of his Impala. She was excited, her cheeks colored, her eyes bright. Riding in a cop car at last, helping the cops on a murder case. Reilly was a cop buff, but of a more select sort than the types that hung around cop bars. The way he met her, she had been a witness in a case. The suspect, Earl Bumpers, had been raping his two daughters for years and pounding on them, too, and he had eventually killed the older one, which brought him to the attention of Paz. The younger daughter, a nine-year-old named Cassie, was the chief witness, and Reilly had therapized away her terror and prepped her for the trial, and the guy went down for it, death, and the two of them, Paz and Reilly, had gotten a little play in the press. He had spotted her in the witness bullpen, and been attracted, the big frank china blues, the golden hair in a staid little knot at the back, the thin, tight body, and he had struck up a conversation. Later, he had spotted her in the Friday six o’clock meat market at the Taurus in the Grove with all the other single women, which surprised him. He’d moved on her in his usual respectful way, and they’d started in. Six or so months, maybe once a week. She was married but separated, no problem there.

She had a practice in the Gables, a nice paneled office, with the dolls and toys, but she dealt mainly with the eating problems of teenage girls. Getting a terrified murder witness to talk was a little out of her line, although she had done it that once and was clearly hot to do it again. Paz was stretching his authority way past the gray area, providing a private shrink for a potential witness, a minor. He had not mentioned it to Barlow, never mind his shift commander, and he was a little nervous. Excited too; both of them nervous and excited.

They were going to do it in the Meagher apartment, Paz’s suggestion, a nod toward the color of legality in his mind. Just a cop who felt sorry for a scared kid, a welfare kid, too, and was bringing a personal friend by to give a little counseling. Should some constructive evidence happen to emerge, why there was nothing wrong with using it, just like you would use a piece of evidence lying in plain sight. Paz figured he could work out a plausible story if anything popped right, which was why he had not told anyone. He wanted to present this to Barlow all tied up, as a coup, as something to make up for the boner about Youghans.

Mrs. Meagher offered sugary iced tea and butter cookies, the tea in tall glasses set in raffia sleeves, with a long spoon in each. They sat around in the tatty, spotless living room, in which the smell of lemon furniture polish fought bravely the base stink of the building and neighborhood. The boy was impatient and resentful of being denied either release to the streets or TV, the girl her usual silent and sullen self. The small talk did not take off. Reilly shot Paz a look: this isn’t working. She changed her approach, asked to speak to the grandmother alone. They went into the kitchen. Paz could hear low talking. Randolph got up and turned on the television, a sitcom, canned laughter. Paz saw no reason to object. After ten minutes or so, Reilly came back with the grandmother. Reilly’s face wore her courtroom expression of neutral goodwill. She approached the girl.

“Tanzi, your grandmother and I have been talking, and we’ve agreed that, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to try hypnosis with you. Do you understand what that means?”

The girl nodded. Randolph said, excitedly, “Yeah! I saw this show where the guy went into his past lives and shit.” Mrs. Meagher said, “Hush your mouth, boy!”

They shut off the television and moved a straight chair in front of the girl, and turned down the lights. Reilly sat in the straight chair and began to speak in the traditional low, insinuating tone. She had tried to do it with Paz once, but it hadn’t worked. It worked with Tanzi Franklin, though?she went off like the television in less than three minutes: head sunk to her chest, eyes closed, breathing with the deep and regular pace of slumber.

“All right, Tanzi,” said Reilly. “It’s last Saturday, around eleven-thirty at night. Do you know where you are?”

“My room.” The girl’s speech was slow, and muffled, as if coming through a blanket.

“Okay, I want you to look out the window of your room and tell me what you see.”

“Roofs. Windows. I was looking for Amy, but she ain’t home. I see them. Theys fighting. The pregnant lady and her boyfriend. He starts in busting up stuff and she be trying to stop him. He hit her on the head. She fall down and he yell at her some more. Then he leaves. She gets up. She’s crying.”

Stopped. A few words of encouragement put the needle back in the groove.

“She’s trying to pick up stuff off the floor. She’s on the couch. He’s talking to her.”

Reilly glanced at Paz and said, immediately and carefully, to Tanzi, “Who’s talking to her, Tanzi? The boyfriend came back?”

“No,” she said. “Not the boyfriend. Him.”

“Can you tell us what he looked like, Tanzi?” said Reilly. Paz could hear the excitement in her voice, under the professional drone.

Tanzi opened her eyes. She looked directly at Paz. Her right arm rose slowly, until the extended index finger pointed straight at him. Mrs. Meagher let out a small cry.

Reilly said, “You mean he looks like Detective Paz?”

“Yes.” The eyes shut again. The arm dropped.

“Tanzi, do you know who he is?” asked Reilly.

“Yes.”

“Who is he?”

The child’s eyes opened again. Paz heard Reilly’s gasp, and then the eyes looked at him, and it was not any fourteen-year-old girl who gazed out through them either. A voice far too deep and rumbling ever to have come out of the larynx of a Tanzi Franklin said, “Me.”

It came in a long extended syllable, striking them all with the nauseating effect of an earthquake’s first tremors. Mrs. Meagher screamed. Tanzi rolled her eyes back in her head, twisted off the couch, and went into a back-arching, teeth-chattering, foaming convulsion. Randolph P. Franklin leaped from his chair and onto Paz, tearing at his face and clothes, trying to get at Paz’s pistol. He was shouting something like “I’ll get him, I’ll get him!” Paz stood up, the boy clinging to him with his legs, holding on with one hand and grabbing for the gun with the other. He seemed to have an unnatural energy. Paz himself felt blurry, as if he, too, had been somewhat hypnotized. He saw Reilly drop down to attend to the convulsing girl. Mrs. Meagher was yelling something that Paz couldn’t make out. He had just pinned Randolph P. Franklin’s arms when something smacked heavily against the back of his head. He looked around and saw Mrs. Meagher holding the handle of a big saucepan in a two-handed grip, getting ready to whale him again.

“Ma’am, please put down the pot …” he began. She swung at his head, but he twisted away and this time the pot hit his shoulder. He tripped over the writhing Randolph and fell down. Mrs. Meagher couldn’t bend over very well and so she could only pound him in a grandmotherly way, but managed all the same to sprinkle him with the contents of the pot.

After a while Mrs. Meagher became exhausted and dropped her weapon. She sat down on a chair, looking gray, and cried. The boy extricated himself and embraced his grandmother. He was crying, too. Tanzi’s convulsions had stopped. Lisa Reilly had moved her so that she was lying flat on the couch. She was holding the girl’s hand, talking softly, but eliciting no apparent response. Paz stood and brushed white gobbets from his clothes. He walked over to the couch. The girl looked destroyed; her mouth was flecked with blood and foam.

“How is she?”

“Jesus, Jimmy, I don’t know,” Reilly said in a frightened whisper. “She’s breathing okay. She’s not convulsing. But I’m not a doctor. I think I’m over my head here. What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” Paz whispered back. “I think we should offer to get the kid to a hospital and then get out of here. Why don’t you talk to the old lady, smooth things over?”

Reilly gave him a sharp look but did as he suggested. She spoke softly. Paz saw the old woman shake her head emphatically, her sparse hair flying. Reilly came back to him and said, “She doesn’t want any more help. Not from us. We should get out of here. I left my card, in the unlikely event …”

They left. Randolph P. Franklin had the last word. Glaring at Paz, he said, “I see you around here again, nigger, I’m gonna bust a cap on your sorry black ass.”

In the car, Paz looked at Reilly and said, “What can I say? I didn’t expect that. It came out of left field.”

“Farther off than that, I think. Good Christ!” She shuddered. “You still have some stuff in your hair.”

“Mashed potatoes,” he said, picking at himself. She brushed at him, annoyingly. “Leave it!” he snapped, and slammed the car into gear. They drove in silence.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to snarl. I’m a little shook.”

“A little ? Jesus! I’m jelly. Jimmy, what the hell was going on there?”

“You’re asking me ? You’re the shrink.”

“No, I have a doctorate from the Barry College School of Social Work. I talk to Gables teens about their body image. I don’t fucking do exorcisms !”

“You did great with Cassie Bumpers.”

“Oh, Cassie Bumpers! All she wanted was someone to tell her she wasn’t the spawn of Satan and didn’t deserve to have the devil fucked out of her by her daddy’s holy prick. I can deal with frightened little kids. Back there … back there, that was something else entirely. I don’t know what the hell that was. No, I do know, I think …”

“What?”

“Possession,” she said, and he looked over at her to see if she were joking, but her face was grim and pale.

“What do you mean, possession ? Like with the head turned around backward and the green vomit?”

“Yeah, right. Go to a library sometime. There’s yards of documentation on it from nearly every culture in the world, from nuns with stigmata to snake handlers in the Ozarks to Siberian shamans. I won’t even mention Africa or what goes on right down the street in Miami fucking Florida. Santería. Christ, you should know more about that than I do.”