Tropic of Night (51 page)

I go outside and bury one at each corner of my house. There is a smell of distant burning, nastily hydrocarbonish, and a red glow to the north, and low heavy clouds, no breath of wind, although the clouds seem to be writhing along, lit from below. They must have tried to take him, and now he’s showing them what he can do if he likes. He doesn’t understand that they will all die before admitting that what he is is real, that they will squat, if it should come to that, in the glowing ruins of their cities and say, coincidence, random, bad luck, natural disaster, unknown terrorists, mass hallucinations, like a mantra. And he will still be invisible, the poor man.

The last little bundle I take up to the loft and hang from the ceiling above Luz’s head. Over my own neck I draw the amulet Uluné gave me when I left Danolo, a little red-dyed leather pouch, into which I have never peered.

Now I clean my Mauser 96, a restful chore. It has no screws in its mechanism at all. Each part pops free with a precisely directed pressure and snaps in with a satisfying click, just where it belongs; the smell of the oil rag reminds me of home, of Dad. After that, I take the rounds out of the box magazine and rub the bullets with a substance designed by Olo technicians to make them penetrate magical objects or beings. Then I reload.

I need a bath, now, to clean the jail stink off my skin, a long hot one in a huge bathtub like they have at Sionnet, but what I have instead is my little chipped one. I stay in it a long time, and wash the last of poor Dolores’s shit-brown out of my hair. After I emerge, I rub the haze from the mirror and contemplate Jane recidivus, trying not to recall the undying ghosts of this same assessing gaze, from my youth, when I cried, and cursed my plain face, and hated my sister, whom the mirror loved. I see the perfect teeth of the rich, quite startling eyes, if I do say so, nose too big, jaw too strong, teeny tiny little skinny lips like worms … At any rate, a lot better looking than Dolores. I get out my barber scissors, spread newspaper, and snip away, snip away, until I have made a rough dark-yellow helmet, jaw length on the sides and back, with a center parting, the somewhat jockish look I had in sophomore year, when I played a lot of field hockey. My husband always liked me to wear it long, and I did, down to the waist in back, braided and pinned up, a pain in the ass in Africa, but the Africans loved it. They used to touch it on the street, like touching a snake, for luck. I carefully gather up all the cut hair, down to the tiniest fragment I can find, and flush it away in the toilet. A little habit in the sorcery biz, practically the first thing Uluné taught me.

I don my ratty blue chenille Goodwill bathrobe and sit in the kitchen in the dark with my gun. The air is stifling, loaded heavy with the usual Miami perfume: jasmine, rot, car exhaust, a rumor of salt water, plus tonight the stink of burned things and … just now, the dulfana, and a dead rat odor. At the screen door I look down in the yard. There are three of them, standing motionless in a group. Paarolawatset . I can’t see their features, but one of them has the sagging shape of the man Paz called Swett.

He doesn’t want me wandering away again, it appears, and has dispatched watch-things to trail me, or maybe he fears for my safety in the chaos he’s causing, and these are guards. That would be like Witt, to think of that.

I sit down and drink water. The thought of food is nearly as nauseating to me as the thought of sleep. I hear thumps and scratching sounds outside, calls of animals and birds whose natural habitat is not South Florida. I get my journals from the box and review my notes, as for a big test. I should be more or less safe from ordinary jinja, his sendings, because Uluné was a major power and he gave me some good stuff. I wish he were here now, Uluné. He wouldn’t actually protect me. He sure didn’t when I was witched out of my hut by Witt and Durakné Den. But I always got the feeling that Uluné was playing a much larger game than the usual sorcerers’ spats, that if he thought it was required, he could have crushed both Witt and his witch teacher like cockroaches. Let Ifa unfold, Jeanne, he would say. Don’t grab at the folds like a greedy child tearing the peel from a fruit. The do-nothing phase of life, as sensei used to put it, so hard for us Americans.

So I wait, and after a while … an hour? A couple of hours? … there is another unfolding. I hear steps on the shell gravel of the drive, and steps on my stairs. I work the action on the Mauser, chambering a magic bullet, and point at the screen door. There is a shadow there, a face. It’s him, Witt. I take aim, not at all confident in my ability to shoot, not even now. Or that the bullet will have any effect.

“Jane? Ms. Doe? Are you there?”

I let out the breath I am holding, and a wave of relief passes through my body, tingling down to my fingers. I lower the gun, and I say, “Come in, Detective Paz. The door’s open.”

He comes in. I turn on the kitchen light. A little double take when he sees the new me. When he notices the pistol he frowns.

“That’s quite a piece.”

“It is. It’s a Mauser 96, old and very rare. It works, though. You look like you’ve had a rough night.”

He has a smudge on his forehead, grease or smoke, and the knees of his tan slacks are grimy.

“You could say that. Can I sit down?” I motion to the other chair and he falls into it heavily. He gestures to my pistol. “Expecting somebody? Or considering another suicide?”

“Troubling times,” I say. “You never can tell who might come by on a night like this. Or what.” This sounds so portentously like the dialogue in a bad horror film that I feel hysteria rising in my throat, and I have to stifle a giggle.

“How do you know I’m not a what?”

“If you were a sending, you couldn’t have gotten in. I have bars up against magical forces. The pistol is for physical beings, like those zombies out in the yard.” He stares at me, his mouth slightly open, like a child’s. A good deal of the slick gloss and confidence he exhibited earlier today seems to have been scraped off Detective Paz by this night’s doings. I feel for him. I recall being scraped myself.

He says, “Shit! This is really happening, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid so,” I say.

He hisses something in Spanish that I don’t quite catch, and strikes the heel of his hand hard against his temple. “Fuck! Sorry, I’ve had a bad day.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Lately? Well, we started the evening by arresting your husband. That didn’t work out too good. He didn’t stay arrested. He was in the back of my car, cuffed, and then he was smoke. Then all hell broke loose, which I thought was a figure of speech until a while ago. You wouldn’t have any idea about how he does all this shit?”

“Actually, I have a very good idea, but I already told you and you didn’t pay any attention. I don’t really feel like going through it again.” I tapped the cover of the journal. “It’s all in here, more or less. You could read it.”

“I might do that.” He looks around my bare kitchen. “You wouldn’t have a drink handy, would you?”

“A drink drink? No, I don’t. But I could run across to Polly’s and borrow a couple of beers.” I rise, pistol in hand. I should have offered, of course; we Does are trained in the elementary courtesies, but there has been a long time between guests chez Jane.

“What about … ?” With a movement of his head he indicates the waiting things in the yard.

“Oh, they won’t bother me. If they do, I’ll shoot them.”

“The zombies? I thought they were dead already.”

“A popular misconception. In any case, I have magical bullets. Stay where you are. Don’t move. I mean really don’t move. You’ll be fine.”

I go down the stairs and cross the yard. The paarolawatset begin to move toward me, but slowly, shuffling like old bums.

I knock on Polly’s side door. The yellow porch light comes on, a curtain pulls aside, showing the terrified face of my landlady. At first she doesn’t recognize me; then, with a look of vast relief, she does. Several locks click and she pulls me inside.

“Dolores! Thank God! What’s going on? I was watching TV and then the cable went down. There’s supposed to be a riot going on. Christ! Is that a gun? Who are those guys in the yard? I called the cops, but 911 is jammed up …”

I put a calming hand on her shoulder. “There’s not going to be a riot around here. Just stay in the house and you’ll be okay. Are the kids in?”

“In L.A. with their father, thank God. They’re due back tomorrow. Dolores, what’s going on?”

I try to radiate confidence. Polly is actually pretty tough, and New Agey enough not to be knocked entirely out of whack by weird doings. “It’s a real long story, but first of all, I’m not Dolores anymore, I’m Jane. My husband isn’t dead, like I told you; he’s alive, and after me, and he’s a … sort of a terrorist, and those are his people out there, watching me.”

“You’re kidding, right? God, you cut and colored your hair! You look great. But seriously, you were hiding from him and he found you? Did you call the cops?”

“Yes. One of them is up in my place and I offered him a beer that I don’t have. I came over to borrow a couple.”

She bursts out laughing, and I join her, and arm in arm we go up to the kitchen and she passes me a six-pack of Miller tallboys from the fridge. She says, “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna go up to bed and turn up the A/C all the way, and put Hildegard von Bingen on the headphones and pull the covers up over my head until this is over.”

I tell her this sounds like a good plan. I am halfway home when I feel a finger scratching at my neck, and then my neck hairs are pulled and twisted in that annoying way she used to do when we were kids, and my sister’s voice comes clearly over my left shoulder. Oh, Janey, you really messed up again, big-time. This is all your fault. Plain Jane. Plain Jane couldn’t stand I was pregnant, you were so jealous you could hardly look at me, you always hated me, Mom said so. That’s why you got him to kill me. You knew he was going to kill me, didn’t you? And my baby. Look at me, Jane! Look what you did to me!

I don’t turn around but keep walking. Slow going; I never realized that it’s about a quarter of a mile from Polly’s house to the garage. The path is closing in: rattan palms rattle and brush my arms, acacias, and locust bean, and all the dry spiky shrubs of the Sahel. My feet sink into the warm sand. A figure looms ahead, blocking my way. It’s my brother. He is naked. He has an erection, which he strokes. Janey, honey, let’s do it in the weeds. Janey, come on like we used to do in the boathouse, come on, Janey, his voice is sweet, low, insistent, come on, Janey, you know Mary and I used to do it all the time. Take off your clothes, Janey, let’s see if you got any tits yet. I raise my pistol and shoot him in the chest. Screaming and crashing in the brush, and laughter, not human, like a hyena. I stagger.

There’s hot breath in my ear, stinking breath, booze and decay. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, says Mom, why do you have to be such a pain in the ass? Look at your sister, just look at her! And there she is, right in front of me now, white and lovely in her little scoop-neck blue linen maternity top and white shorts. She smiles her cover girl smile. She opens the top and her insides fall out of her ripped belly as she smiles on. There is shrill howling, like a dog hit by a car.

Something grabs my left arm, hard. I raise the gun, but it is batted away and I am hauled up off my feet, an arm around my waist. I feel stair treads under my zoris. Detective Paz is heaving me up the stairs and into my apartment.

I collapse inside the door, my head against the cool porcelain of the stove.

“I heard the shot,” he says. “I think you popped one of those … those guys. You were turning in a circle and screaming, about ten feet from the stairs.”

“Yeah. It’s not so good out there right now.” I crawl on hands and knees to the bathroom. I lay my cheek on the rim of the toilet and retch up a little yellow slime. I hear the snap of a pop-top and the gurgling sound of a man knocking down most of a twelve-ounce in one slug.

“Feeling better?” he asks when I totter back and collapse into a chair next to him.

“Much. If I were a bell, I’d be ringing. Thank you for coming out there after me.”

“You had the beer. What was going on?”

“Just paging through the family album. Look, I think we’re stuck here for a while. We’ll be okay here unless he decides to come in person.”

“In which case, you’ll waste him with that funny gun. Or I will.”

“No,” I snap, “if he comes here, I’ll probably shoot you, and maybe my daughter, too, or you us. Surely it has finally sunk in that he can control what we see? If I think he’s approaching in person, we unload the firearms and put them out of reach. We can’t fight him in m’fa; I have to stop him in m’doli . If I can.”

He drains his beer and pops another. “Want one?” he asks, offering. I drink a sip. I can feel it trickle all the way down into what feels like an empty fifty-five-gallon drum. Paz is fingering my journal. He says, “Would there be a part here that explains how a bunch of highly trained cops got into a gunfight with people who weren’t there and then started shooting one another?” He shudders. “And how somebody else, some fucking Ku Klux Klan bastard, is living in my partner’s body? In small words.”

“Small words? You’ve seen a grel . That makes it easier. Sorry, grel ? greletis the plural. Mind demons. The Chenka call them ogga . Okay, the short version: One, the psyche is real, like metal and electricity. It’s its own thing. Psyches live in complex brains like ours, but they’re not strictly speaking products of our brains. And they can live outside of brains too.” I tell him in plain language what the Olo make of the mental phenomena that still baffle Western science?manic-depression, schizophrenia, mass hysteria, intuition, sexual attraction …

“I thought that was all chemicals?the mental disease business,” he says.

“Yes, right. But that view of the mind ignores tens of thousands of personal accounts of psychic experiences?falling in love with unsuitable people, premonitions, significant dreams, spirit possession, ghostly apparitions, religious ecstasies. Inexplicable behavior, we like to call it. The regular joe who every so often just has to rape and strangle a little girl. Afterward, he feels better. Of course he feels better; his grel is well fed, like a leopard after a nice haunch of antelope. Or the well-brought-up kid with no obvious symptoms who one day murders his parents and starts shooting everyone in school, or on a slightly grander scale, the fact that the most civilized and technically advanced nation in Europe once decided to put itself totally in the hands of an uneducated wacko with a funny mustache and a hypnotic stare. Yeah, it’s all so-called chemistry, but since we don’t know squat about how it works, calling it chemistry is just another kind of incantation. It’s not science.”