Tropic of Night (38 page)

“They find her body?” Paz asked.

“No, I mean the boat really blew up. They had a propane tank aboard, a full load of diesel fuel, and a gas tank for the auxiliary outboard. They saw the fireball in New London. If she was on it when it went up, she was crab food, and we got a lot of crabs out in the Sound.”

“You think suicide?”

“Accident is what’s in the official report,” said Heinrich, his tone flat. “A Catholic family. And what did it matter, anyway? Off the record, and personally? I think she was running for it and got careless. It’s easy to blow up a boat if you’re not careful.”

“Or maybe she faked it and escaped,” said Barlow.

“Possible but unlikely. She hasn’t turned up since, she didn’t pull any serious money out of her accounts before she took off, and she hasn’t accessed any of her money since. You’d have to believe she went crazy, butchered her sister, and then escaped with a plan like some kind of international criminal mastermind. It doesn’t work for me. Or it didn’t until you guys called. Now, I don’t know. I mean, guys, there is just no one else I like for it the way I like Jane Clare Doe. And if she did get away, maybe she ended up in Miami. So was she crazy? I’ll tell you one thing: her husband sure in hell thought so. Maybe she still is. Maybe she got to like it.”

The wind awakens me an hour or so before dawn. I get out of my hammock and go outside to the landing at the head of the stairs. Luz is in her new room, so I no longer have to be so careful when I leave. It’s not a hurricane, I know; it’s impossible to live in Miami and ignore the hectic preparations that surround hurricanes. But it’s a strong wind all the same, making the neighboring palms and cycads rattle and clatter, and bringing from the stiff-leaved figs and crotons a continuous slithering sound, like brushes on snare drums. It’s blowing thirty knots, I estimate, and from the distant harbor I can hear the rigging of the boats complaining with insane jangles. A warm wind, gritty, the kind that generates static electricity and causes the ionic composition of the body to change subtly, encouraging madness. Not a typical Miami wind. A wind from somewhere else, like the harmattan, the wind from the Sahara, although it’s way too early for the harmattan.

In the morning, when Luz and I go out, there’s a flat calm. The car and all the foliage around it are covered with flour-fine red-ocher dust. I run my finger across the roof of the Buick and place it in my mouth. Mali on my tongue. Yes, I say in my head, yes, yes, all right, I get the message. Go to the ile, make the sacrifice. Thank you. Luz draws a big heart in the dust on the car door.

At work, I give Mrs. Waley notice that I am retiring from the profession of medical data clerk. She asks suspiciously whether I have been offered a job in budget or admin, and I am glad to tell her, no, I’m leaving the health services field entirely. I say that I have a medical problem that precludes regular hours. I can see that she’s fainting to ask me what my problem is, but she doesn’t. Instead she tells me, conferring upon me her first smile ever, that I’ve been a good worker and that it’s been a pleasure to have me in her department.

In the hallways, the hospital’s cleaning crews are working hard to get rid of last night’s dust, which defeats even the high-technology filters that feed air into these buildings. They push hair brooms and sprinkle green fluffy stuff to soak up the pale, gritty powder. I remember trying to do it with a twig broom. You could never get the floor actually looking clean, but in the harmattan season you had to do it every day or it would be up to your ankles before you knew it.

We went to Africa because of Lou Nearing and Captain Dinwiddie, an odd combination, but typical of Ifa’s web. Lou had come to town the previous winter for the American Anthro Society meeting, bringing his wife along, and he called Witt and we took them to dinner at Balthazar, to show continuing friendship on our part, and, I suppose, for Lou to show off his wife and to show her me, the old flame. Witt was his usual charming self, the Nearings were in fact charmed, and a dinner fraught with awkward possibilities went off fairly well. They wanted to see White History Month, too, and over dessert Lou said that he had been talking about me just the other day with Desmond Greer, who had just taken over the Yoruba archive at Chicago. It seemed he had a grant to travel over to Yorubaland to, among other things, trace the origins and distribution of Yoruba traditional magic, and Lou had brought up my name. Greer, whom I knew slightly, was one of the few admirers Marcel retained in American academia, not of the crazy stuff, of course, but of the solid ethnographic part of his work, and according to Lou, he was interested in the possibility, especially if I’d pick up my own expenses. I said I didn’t know anything about Africa, and Lou said that Greer didn’t care about that, he wanted a Vierchau-style take on the origins and changes in the tradition, someone who had the skills to get inside it and see what made it real to the people who used it. Good old Lou! He always thought I was better than I thought I was, always pushing at me not to drop out of the field.

I said, “Gosh, Lou, a year in Africa? I don’t know. I’m rusty. I don’t know the background or the languages …” Lou said, “Hell, Janey, you got nine months to pick that up. You wouldn’t be leaving until September.” Witt said, “Africa? Hey, let’s go! I need to go there anyway for the Captain, and we could do stuff together. It’ll be a blast.” Cindy Nearing asked who the Captain was and Witt slid away from the question as he always did, with “just some stuff I’m playing with.”

After that night, he wouldn’t let it go, us doing it together. I listened, it sounded reasonable, it was as far as you could get from Siberia and the Chenka, and so I called Greer and flew out to Chicago and met him in his office in Haskell. He showed me around the Yoruba Ethnographic Archive and talked about what the team he was taking over hoped to accomplish. He assumed I was more like Marcel than I was at the time, but perhaps he was more percipient than I gave him credit for being, given how things turned out. When I told him about my husband’s wish to come along, he said he admired Witt’s work and would be glad to meet him and have him tacked on to the expedition. My own race did not come up as an issue, which was fine with me.

That was the Lou Nearing part. The Captain Dinwiddie part was that since he was about nineteen my husband had been laboring intermittently on a long poem about America, seen, of course, from its black bottom. It was called Captain Dinwiddie. He regarded it as his real life’s work.

I am, I admit it, a prosey person. Aside from one comp lit course at Barnard, I got all my poetry through Witt. I therefore have no idea whether Captain Dinwiddie is one of the supreme works of American literature or a pretentious farrago. It’s certainly an interesting story. The eponymous hero’s a slave in the antebellum South; he escapes, lands in New York, is adopted by a rich abolitionist, is given an education, and takes the name Dinwiddie. In the Civil War he leads a regiment of dragoons, ends up occupying the very same ole plantation, and turns it into a kind of Heart of Darkness in reverse, with him in the big house and the white folks chopping cotton, him screwing Miss Ann of course. He ends up fleeing back to Mother Africa, where he learns via juju how to travel through time, to view the sad future history of his people, descending in the flesh one day a year, to perform some expiatory good deed. But Witt knew nothing of Africa, less about African religion or magic. He said he was blocked as a result, and the invitation from Greer at just this time seemed to him a good omen. Synchronicity.

Reading the journals again, in the hot kitchen of my place; Luz is playing with Jake and Shari out in the yard. They have the hose out and a plastic splash pool. I always meant to take her to Venetian Pool in Coral Gables and teach her how to swim, but just now I have given up on plans. Except that I have arranged for Shari to baby-sit Luz tonight, because I am going to Pedro Ortiz’s ile, to make ebo, as Ifa has told me to do. I feel myself dropping back into belief, as I was toward the end there in Africa, slipping into the whole thing, as into dark, blood-warm water, although I know it is absurd, spells and spirits and curses and witches, but … Thomas Merton once said that there comes a point where your religion seems ridiculous, and then you discover to your surprise that you are still religious.

When it gets dark, in the usual instant collapse of day that tells you “tropics,” I say good-bye to Luz and Shari and go. On the way there, I stop at a botanica and purchase thirty-two small cowrie shells. Although I have never been to a Santería ritual before, I find I am succeeding in keeping my anthropological curiosity under control. My knees are shaking. I am wearing a yellowish cotton dress with a green patent leather belt on it. Ifa likes these colors.

Ortiz’s ile is lodged in a small salmon-colored house, concrete-block stucco with white hurricane shutters and a gray cement tile roof, on NW Seventeenth off Flagler. As in many of the neighboring houses, what was once a front lawn has been paved over, to serve as a mini—parking lot. It is full of cars both old and new, as are the curbs nearby. I park at the end of the block and walk down.

A woman admits me when I ring. She is the woman from pets, but she looks different tonight, straighter, not as worn. She smells of roses and wears a white dress embroidered with gold around the yoke. The room she takes me into, the living room, is dim, and lit by dozens of candles. The candles stand on wide shelves running around two sides of the room, and illuminate hundreds of Santería ritual objects arranged in shrines: the two-headed axes of Shango, his mortar stool, his sopera, the tureen holding his sacred stones, his fundamentos. Other soperas, too, each decorated in the orisha ‘s symbolic colors, yellow for Oshun, with her peacock fan, white for Obalala, with his fly whisk, black and light blue for Babaluaye, with his crutches, cowries, and reeds, a red-and-white coconut for Oshosi, the hunter, with an iron cauldron containing deer antlers, bow and arrows, and a plastic toy rifle. There are statues in each shrine, too, some of them life size, of the santos, the orishas, Catholic saints melded with Yoruba demigods, all with brown skins, large eyes, and blank expressions. Placed high, wired to the ceiling, is Osun, the herbal messenger, bird staff in hand, who protects the life of the devotees on their journeys to God.

There are people in the room, a half-dozen women in white dresses and four men in guayabera shirts, unpacking large black boxes. I see they are removing drums. There is to be a bembé, then, a celebration of the anniversary of the descent of one of the orishas onto a member of Ortiz’s ile. This is not good. I had thought, in and out, pay the money, get the sacrifice, Ifa satisfied, only a brief appearance in the m’doli, maybe I won’t be noticed.

Ortiz is waiting in one of the house’s small bedrooms, which he has turned into a shrine to Ifa, or Orula, as he’s known among the Santería people. He’s got yellow and green silk bunting draped on the walls and ceiling, a life-size statue of Orula in his guise as Saint Francis. Before this, draped in green-and-gold brocade heavy with elaborate beadwork, is the yard-high cylinder containing Ifa-Orula’s fundamentos. There are flickering candles in green glass tumblers, bouquets of gladiolas, frangipani, oleander, and jasmine, and piles of coconuts and yams, dozens and dozens of yams. I can smell the earth stink of them, mixed with the heavy odor of the flowers and the burning wax. One wall is nearly filled with a massive black wood cabinet, heavily carved: the canastillero, which contains shelves full of sacred objects. On the other wall there is a small table and two chairs for divinations.

He’s sitting in one of the chairs, looking like an ordinary black Cuban, no masklike visage, no strangely luminous eyes, just a guy in a white guayabera and white slacks. But spontaneously I dip my knee and touch my mouth and forehead, the way I used to greet Uluné. You see Olo kids do this, whenever an elder walks by; they’ll stop what they’re doing and make the gesture, and maybe get a pat on the head, and go right back to what they were doing before. I know that santeros get a different kind of obeisance, but Ortiz seems to accept mine.

I take the chair opposite. Ortiz smiles and takes my hand. He strokes it gently, in circles, with his thumb. No adult has touched me other than formally for nearly three years. He says, a statement not a question, “You are very frightened.”

“Yes. I thought you would be alone. I didn’t expect these others, or the bembé. I just wanted the sacrifice …”

“Yes, like McDonald’s,” he says, and his smile briefly grows into a grin, showing gold. “We could have a drive-through window?two pigeons and a rooster, please.” And more seriously: “Look, chica, you are safe here, as safe as you can be anywhere. We are under the protection of the santos in this house. You’ll come to the bembé, maybe the orishas will come down and tell you something you need to know.”

He has the animals ready. I give him my cowries. The four little lives depart, with brief flutters, to Orun. He grasps my hand. I want to leave, but there is no strength in the desire. I am on the line, well hooked.

From the other room comes the sound of someone tuning a fucking drum. After a long moment, I bow my head, submitting. I want to throw up, but I swallow thick, ropy saliva, and keep it down.

He rises, still holding my hand. Hand in hand, his warm, mine feeling like film-wrapped supermarket chopped chuck, we go back to the living room. Here the scent of flowers, too, and sacrificial rum, and the harsh sweet smell of the vapor from the holy spray cans they sell in the botanicas. People come up to Ortiz and pay him homage, a bow, the murmured moforabile, the acknowledgment of Ifa living in him; he embraces each and murmurs a blessing in Yoruba. We stand around while the drummers set up. They are all thin black men in white clothes. They have African names: Lokuya, Aliletepowo, Iwalewa, Oribeji. Their drums are familiar to me: the big bata; the iya, shaped like an unequal hourglass, the bell-hung, goatskin-headed mother drum, which talks and sets the changes; the midrange itotele; and the small, sharp-tongued okokolo. The Olo have these, or ones like these, and they also have the immense heartbeat ojana, which shakes the ground, and which you hear with your whole body, not just the ears. The drum does stuff to you in the hands of an expert, whether you want to have stuff done to you or not, which is why, since my return from Drum Central until tonight, I have avoided their beat.