Tropic of Night (39 page)

More people come in and honor Ortiz and the orishas. Ortiz introduces me to each. They all have African names too. Ositola, Omolokuna, Mandebe. They seem like ordinary, hardworking, lower-middle-class black people, the kind you see in the hallways at Jackson, pushing waxers, carrying sterile packs and boxes of tools. They are shy when they meet me. We make small talk. I chat briefly with a woman called Teresa Solares, stocky, moon-faced, around thirty, I judge, worn-looking, wearing a tight yellow dress. She is a home health aide on the Beach. We have something in common, then, both of us health professionals, but our conversation does not flourish. I meet some others, Margarita and Dolores (oh, we have the same name!, a smile exchanged) and Angela and Celia. They think I am an alien here. I wish that I were. The room is crowded now and hot.

The four drummers sit and face one of the shrines. It is the one to Eleggua-Eshu, always the first to be honored at these affairs, because you have to ask him to open the way between Orun and Ayé. Orun, in both Santería and Yoruba cosmology, is the spirit world, the world of the ancestors and the gods, which the Olo call m’arun. Ayé is the m’fa . The Yoruba say, Ayé l’oja, orun n’ile: the world is a marketplace where we visit, heaven is our home.

The drums start. My stomach rolls over. They are good, almost Olo standard. The oriate, the special devotee of Eleggua-Eshu, turns out to be the woman from PETS; she takes up a gourd rattle and begins her praise song. The ile chants along: Ago ago ago ago. Open open. She is dancing before the shrine of Eleggua, and everyone else is swaying, too. Something changes in the room; a different, more energetic air seems to circulate now. It’s happening.

The man on the iya does a frantic run and the drumming stops. The room sighs. The colors are starting to go funny. Now the drums start up again, and the praise song rises to Shango, orisha of force and war. The oriates of Shango whirl and stomp, but Shango does not come. The drums call the others in turn, Yemaya, orisha of the seas, Oshosi, orisha of the hunt, Inle, orisha of medicine, Oshun, orisha of love. Now something is happening within the group of dancers; the circle of moving flesh draws back, hollowing its center. In the ring thus made Teresa Solares is spinning, eyes shut, arms waving like water weeds, swaying her hips. Sweat flies off her, making red sparks where the candles catch the flying droplets. Everyone is chanting eshu eshu ?hold hold. The beat quickens, impossibly fast; Teresa spins around three times on one heel, rolls her eyes up, and crashes to the floor. The drums stop instantly. The silence is astounding.

Several of the santerías help her to her feet and attempt to lead her away, but she shrugs them off and stands erect. She seems to have gained eight inches in height. Her face is utterly transformed, the eyes huge and bright, the features more defined. She rips off the clip that holds her hair, which swings out, as if electrified, like a lion’s mane. She is now Oshun. The drums take up a complex rhythm and Oshun dances. It is erotic beyond sex, beyond belief, Life Herself, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, and we all like flowers lean forward swaying, as if toward a dancing sun. Oshun dances around the circle, feet hardly touching the ground, an ordinary woman with no training, dancing intricate steps, graceful as a puma. She kisses the devotees, she whispers to them, they stick currency to the sweat of her body, little sacrifices, and now she is before me. I fumble a dollar out of my bag and stick it below her neck.

She speaks to me in a deep contralto voice, sweet and thick as molasses, nothing like Teresa’s voice: “Child of Ifa, listen! Ifa says, go by water. Ifa says, before you close the gate, it must first be opened. Ifa says, the yellow bird will save you. Ifa says bring the yellow bird to the father. Ifa says, go by water, only by water.”

Oshun whirls away. I realize she has been speaking Yoruba, which Ms. Solares does not speak, as far as I know. I recall now that Ifa does not dance himself, he always dances through Oshun. The orisha finishes her dance and goes off with a few of the women who want a private consultation. The drums take up the beat again. The orishas start to come more easily, the excitement is palpable now, the whole house seems to be shaking, this is becoming a good, a really remarkable bembé. Ogun arrives, the angry smith, his voice booms bass notes from the throat of Julia, a dark woman of only moderate size. Obatala comes into Mercedes, spreading calm and clarity, and Margarita becomes Yemaya, capricious and powerful, the sea-mistress.

Then Shango comes, mounting a mild-looking middle-aged man named Honorio Lopez. When the orisha rises from Honorio’s faint, the devotees dress him in a red-and-white satin tunic, a red sash and a red headdress. The drums take up a staccato, violent beat, and he dances, crouched, then leaping impossibly high, then stamping his feet. He circles the ile, conversing with the devotees in a loud, harsh voice, making crude jokes and uttering threats. Then he stands before me, scowling, giving off an aura of violent energy, like a guy coming into a bar, looking for a fight. I can see him draw breath to shout at me, and without warning he changes again. That breath whooshes out of him; he appears stunned. He sags.

Then his face takes on a look of amused and curious detachment. My husband says, “Well, Jane, here you are.” I am turned to stone. He goes on, in a conversational voice, “I know you don’t believe this, but I missed you, I really did. For a while there, I really thought you were dead. And I looked for you. I mean in m’doli. Me and Orpheus. But you weren’t there. And you weren’t in m’fa either, as far as I could see. You were being quiet as a mouse, weren’t you? By the way, you look awful, Jane. What did you do to your hair?”

I say, “Please, don’t hurt anybody else.”

He grins at me. “Oh, don’t worry about this guy. Shango won’t mind me borrowing his horse for a while. But I really do need to talk to you. Gosh, we used to talk about everything, remember? I need to talk to you about my plans.”

The people have noticed what’s going on. They stare at us, confused. The Shango song on the drums falters and dies. Ortiz is shouting something in Spanish at the drummers. They start to play again, and Ortiz begins a chant to Eleggua-Eshu, asking him to open the gates to Orun again and draw the orishas back to the other world.

He says, “They’re playing my song. Catch you later, Janey.” The most hideous thing here is the perfectly rational sanity of his tone and affect. Now the man in front of me loses all expression, his eyes roll up and go white, he crumples. The other orishas are leaving, too, their mounts dropping like shot birds. I race out of the house.

By the time I crunch up on my driveway, I have almost convinced myself that the thing with Shango and my husband didn’t happen. A little hallucination there, brought on by stress, and the drums, and the setting, and cultural conditioning, and exohormones unleashed in the hot room, the same way we all hallucinated the physical changes in the mounted devotees, and their messages. That little colloquy with my husband was what I imagined he would say, and thus I heard Mr. Lopez say it. A good Jungian explanation so I can go to sleep. I am really terrific at this sort of rationalization. Marcel always commented on it.

Shari goes sleepily home with my thanks and five bucks. I take a long shower to scrub off the evening’s various effluvia, yank on my worn sleeping shirt, and heave into my hammock. I am asleep instantly.

Only to awake later. It is deep in the night and silent but for the thrum of the nearby A/Cs. Moonlight is spilling through my rattan blinds, making icy calligraphy on the wall opposite the window. This is ridiculous, I’m thinking now, being stalked by a serial killer and farting around with all this voodoo crap. I have to get small, get gone, adiós Miami, do it now. I pack; there’s not much. I go up and get Luz. She is out cold, and curiously dense and heavy, like a statue in my arms. I place her on the backseat of the Buick. We take off.

I drive up Douglas to the Trail and then west. There is little traffic. Past the turnpike overpass the road is completely deserted. There is ground mist in the headlight beams, and once some beast, a dog, a possum, shines yellow eyes in my lights. The car is acting up now, I really should have fixed the trannie. I lose top gear and slow to thirty-five. We are in the Everglades, driving through a narrow hot black velvet tunnel made by the headlights. Another gear blows out, the engine wails, and we drop to an even slower speed. We will never make it to Naples.

But suddenly there is a glow ahead, which turns into lights, lots and lots of them, abolishing the blackness of the Glades. It is a huge truck stop, with a big tan building to one side. imokalee indian casino, announces a great blinking neon sign. The transmission gives out completely now. I heave my butt forward and back on the seat, like a kid in a toy car, urging the Buick to safety. We roll into the shining station. There is an Indian in the station office, huge, braid-haired, dark-faced, grave, wearing coveralls and a Dolphins hat. I ask him if he can fix my transmission and he says, Sure, we can fix anything. He cranks the Buick up on his lift. Give me an hour, he says. I am inexpressibly glad, almost in tears. I wake Luz, and together we walk into the casino.

It is very bright, and loud music is playing, Disney tunes, oddly enough, “Bippidy-Boppidy-Boo” and “When You Wish upon a Star.” There are endless rows of flashing slot machines; the ceiling is mirrored. I decide that we should play the slots while we wait; maybe we can make some money here for our trip. I get a bucket of quarters. We start feeding them into the machines. Almost immediately Luz hits a jackpot. The coins flow out over the floor, covering her feet to the ankles. We scoop them into a larger bucket. I tell Luz to keep playing out of the smaller bucket, while I go off and cash the jackpot in for chips. I am elated. I feel my luck has finally changed. For a while I play blackjack. I win and win. Then I play roulette for a while. The chips pile up.

Now I feel a thrill of fear. How long has it been? Hours? I take my winnings and go back to the slot machine area to find Luz. There seem to be acres of aisles all alike. The flashing lights and the noise of the machines and the Disney music (“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”) is driving me crazy. I run up and down the aisles shouting her name. Then I see her, walking hand in hand with a large woman in a yellow dress. I shout at her. The woman turns around. I see that it is Luz’s mother, the woman I killed. I run and run now, lost in the maze and the mirrors; I run very slowly, I can hardly move my legs now?

I’m in my hammock, heart a-thump, soaked with sweat. The moonlight through the rattan blinds makes a pattern against the opposite wall. I get to my feet. My knees are trembling. I have not had a dream like that in a while. I go to the bathroom and splash some water on my face. I look at my face in the mirror. Yes, it’s me, my perm squashed by sleep into something agricultural looking. No grinning skulls or African masks. I pinch my cheek. Real.

There’s a scratching sound just above my head, tiny skittering claws. Trembling, I go outside, to see if it’s the raccoon. I don’t see her from my landing, but there is something dark and low moving across the garden, illuminated by the waning moon. Oh, it’s just Jake the dog. The hum of the A/C is calming, ordinary, familiar.

I’m just about to try to get some more sleep when there is a shriek from upstairs. I race up the ladder. Another shriek. She’s having a nightmare, too. Luz’s room is lit by moonlight through her round window and by her Kermit the Frog nightlamp, which casts a greenish-yellow glow. As I run to her, a huge cockroach crosses my path. It is so big that at first I think it is a mouse. I sidestep and crush it under my bare foot. Luz is screaming hysterically now. I race to her and sit on the bed and snatch her to me, wrapped in her pink blanket. She is struggling in my arms, and I say, Wake up, wake up, darling, it’s only a dream. Her mouth is wide open in a rictus of terror, her eyes squeezed tight shut. I feel a tickle on my arm. It is another cockroach, as big as the first. I brush it off. There is a peculiar movement under the pink blanket. I tear it away, and I see that the whole bed is a mass of cockroaches. They are all over Luz, boiling and skittering under her flowered cotton nightdress. The construction I did up here must have disturbed a whole colony of them. I leap from the bed and hold Luz at arm’s length; I shake her, hard. Showers of roaches fall around my feet. Some of them crawl up my legs. I am dancing around, crushing them underfoot, shaking the child, the carpet becoming slimy under my bare soles. A cockroach climbs over my arm and across Luz’s face and into her mouth. She starts to strangle. I reach into her mouth for the thing, but I can’t get a grip. It is disappearing down her throat. Her lips are turning blue. I can’t reach it, although my hand feels like it is halfway to her lungs.

I am in the hammock, with the moonlight making patterns on the opposite wall. The A/C across the way hums. No time appears to have passed. I understand now that I am under assault. My heart is knocking in my chest. This is bad, but not as bad as some witch-dreams I have heard of. People who don’t wake up, for example, found in the morning with the familiar eye-bulging expression, or drowned in blood or vomit.

Okay, easily fixed?no more sleep until further notice. I get up, wash my sweaty face, pull my painter’s overalls over my T-shirt, and make a big pot of coffee. I discover I am hungry, which I take for a good sign, so I make a three-egg omelette and toast to go with the coffee. I drink the whole pot; the last cup I take sitting on my landing outside, enjoying the tropical sunrise and the birdsong, trying to forget about the night. In Africa, I always used to rise with the birds. A flight of green parrots zips overhead, complaining. The palms rustle in the new sea breeze. I could be in Africa now, except for the coffee.

Luz comes downstairs and I hear the refrigerator open as she takes out the milk. I go in and supervise her pouring out over her Captain Crunch. She seems dull and irritable. I ask her whether she has had any dreams, and she says no, but that is probably not true. I get her dressed and we go off to nursery school and work. The routine calms me. I will be sorry to give it up. Last night at the ile seems like part of the dreams that came afterward.