Tropic of Night (61 page)

With that she walked into her bedroom and shut the door.

Paz drove slowly through the city, to his apartment, showered, and got into bed. For a while he listened to grel thoughts: crazy bitch, white girl, couldn’t possibly understand, never going to do that shit, need to find some other women, need to move out of this place, quit the restaurant, what am I supposed to do, go see Yoiyo, what crap, he’d spit in my face … and then fell into an unprofitably dreamless sleep.

In the morning, there were TV crews outside his house, wanting interviews and film. He brushed past them and drove to the Grove, to the garage on Hibiscus Street, thinking about not going anywhere, about becoming the turtle-faced cop, sixty and all alone, getting blow jobs from teen whores under the crime lights and never a woman to love him like Jane Doe had loved her demon husband. He thought about what Jane had said the night before. For a moment a different path opened up in his mind, a path that led to being a different kind of person. It didn’t last long. He thought he might try to open it again, though.

He found Jane’s apartment empty, stripped of everything but a few trash bags with Goodwill written on a note pinned to one of them. Paz felt a vast relief, mixed with … no, he was not going to go there today. What he’d do now, he thought, was take a week or so of leave, avoid the newsies, maybe fly over to Bimini for a couple of days, meet someone, maybe a girl in a string bikini, a regular person with no cosmic powers who didn’t know him at all and didn’t care …

“Hey, Paz.”

He went out on the landing. She was there, with Luz, saying good-bye to her neighbors, a large, hippie-looking woman with two mulatto kids and the pregnant woman, Dawn, with her toddler in tow. They seemed genuinely sad to see her go, actual tears. She walked halfway up the stairs.

“Well, Paz, how’s reality?” she asked cheerfully. “Thought any about what I said?”

“Reality is holding,” he said, ignoring the rest. “I came to see you off.” He handed her a bottle of champagne.

“Thank you. Must I break it over the hull?”

“Whatever.”

“Then I think I’ll drink it tonight. Will you do me a favor?”

“Anything.” A hint of suspicion in his tone.

“Drive us down to the dock and help me get loaded, and then take the Buick and give it to some deserving poor.”

“No problem,” he said happily.

They drove to Dinner Key then, and Paz got one of the little marina carts and unloaded their small baggage and helped them wheel it down to where the yacht was anchored. He waited on the dock with Luz while Jane stowed their gear and did various mysterious things around the vessel. Jane came back on deck from the cabin. Paz handed the child over to her. Jane had donned an orange life jacket, and now she strapped a miniature version onto Luz.

Under the jacket Jane was wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki Bermudas. She had Top-Sider boat shoes and a pair of fancy sunglasses on, they looked like Vuarnets, Paz thought, extremely cool, and she looked terrific. Bye-bye, Jane. Sad, but also a little relieved.

She said, “I can’t really handle this rig under sail myself so I’ll stop up the Waterway and pick up an itinerant sailing freak for crew, or else I’m going to have to putt along inland up to New York. What I really want to do is run out Government Cut from here and head for blue water and feel a live deck under my toes again.” She stepped up onto the dock and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she dropped onto the boat again, down below this time, and he heard the heavy cranking of a diesel and then the sough-sough of a sweetly tuned engine idling, and smelled the acrid smoke of the exhaust. She untied the stern line and brought it aboard, coiling it neatly with an obviously practiced motion.

“Paz, if you would be so kind,” she said from the wheel, gesturing at the line forward. He untied it, coiled it roughly, tossed it on deck. The boat drifted slowly away from the dock. He saw green water, darkly shadowed. A few inches, a foot, widening. He looked at her, at her wheel, the light shining in her hair. Two feet; she was drifting away. He felt suddenly an enormous urge to leap the gap, to abandon his life, to spend the rest of it with her. She tipped her glasses up onto her head, so he could see her eyes, green as the water. She knew what he was thinking, he thought. The feeling passed, leaving a hollow sadness.

Three feet, then ten. She turned the wheel. The bow swung away from the dock. Last look; he couldn’t quite read the expression on her face, whether it was joy or something else. In any case, she blew him a kiss, and he watched Jane Doe escape by water.

alujonnu?an evil spirit

ama?head

arun?spirit world

ashe?spiritual energy

babandolé?sorcerer

b’fan?god

bfunai?personal soul

bon?house

bonch’dolé?sorcerer’s house

ch’akadoulen?a magical object

ch’andouli?sorcery power

chinté?spell

danolo?where the Olo dwell

debentchouajé?harmonious connection

dez?gold

dik?not Olo

dontzeh?sefuné-less child; witch

dulfana?aura of witchcraft

faila’olo?invisibility

fana?the magical body

gd?female

gdezdikamai?goldenheaded foreigner married not quite a female (Jane’s name)

gdola?woman

gdsefuné?soul-mother

grel (pl. grelet)?demon(s) of the mind

ila?fate, line, fishline

ilegbo?to enter trance

ilegm’bet?primary trance state

ilidoni?lit. “shameful march,” the Olo migration

imai?child

imasefuné?soul-child

im’otunas?thought

jiladoul?sorcerers’ war

jinja?sending, sorcerous animal

kadoul?sorcerous compound

komo?bark and leaves used in Olo sorcery

m’doli?the unseen world, the domain of sorcery

m’fa?pedestal, creation, the world

m’fon?the physical body

ndol?sorcery

okunikua?fourfold sacrifice

olawa?man

olo?real people

or’ashnet?god-touched

otunas?the intellect, mind

owa?male classifier

owabandolets?sorcery teacher

owadeb?”father” honorific

owasefuné?soul-father

paarolawats?lit. “destroyed person,” a zombie

sefuné?affective soul

t’chona?river wight

te?negative suffix

tembé?world soul

tetechinté?countersorcery

vono ba-sefuné?merging of souls

weidouliné?magical ally

zandoul?a container for magical objects

Aluesfan?non-Chenka woman

dala?demonic sex

fentienskin?shamaness

ketzi?animal prison for bad spirit

ogga?psychic being in mind

rishen, rishot?demons

teniesgu?women’s magic

Afterwords

In a sense, this book began with me being bitten by an octopus in a Bimini lagoon. I had stalked the wily creature to its lair in the coral, and had squirted ammonia into the hole to force it out, when all at once it emerged in a rush, and instead of blowing ink and trying to flee, like any normal octopus, it swarmed up my arm and bit me. Octopuses are venomous, but at the time no one was really sure how toxic their bite was, because so few people had been bitten by one. The reason I was in Bimini, in a boat, with my arm starting to look like a blackish zucchini, instead of sitting in an editorial office in New York, remains even now somewhat obscure. Somewhere in my twenty-third year, after having always been an English major-type and writer, I succumbed to a brainstorm and decided to go back to school, get a B.S. and then become a marine biologist. Who knows why we do these things? A little Captain Cousteau, a little Rachel Carson, the desire not to do the expected, the notion of being able to earn a living dressed in a bathing suit instead of tweeds…

In any case, in a few years I found myself working for a doctorate at the University of Miami’s celebrated marine laboratory, where I soon discovered that marine biology did not consist exclusively, or even mainly, of floating blithely among picturesque coral reefs or contemplating the mysteries of the deep. Much of the field, and the main emphasis of the professors thereof, involved collecting creatures, classifying them, pickling them in formalin, and snipping them up under the microscope, or else taking enormous numbers of precise measurements in an effort to find out why a particular limpet chose a particular rock. I was not good at these things. What I really wanted to do was to laze around in that bathing suit and watch animals. Luckily, it turned out that there was a sub-area of biology devoted to doing just that, or nearly; it was called ethology, and that was where I chose to do my dissertation. The animal I chose to do it on was the octopus.

Now, the ethologist’s main task is to understand the perceptual world of the animal and that requires a tricky kind of concentration, especially with a creature like the octopus, which is basically a snail that’s as smart as a cat, and from the human perspective the most alien intelligence on the planet. You don’t really get this from the data, as in conventional science: it comes to you through long experience, and then you can construct an experimental regime that will allow non-bathing-suited scientists to share what you’ve learned. Thus Bimini, thus the boat and the bite.

When I arrived at the little marine station, the station director was standing on the dock with a lovely blonde woman wearing a robe and a bikini. This was how I happened to meet J. I said, “I’ve been bitten by an octopus,” which turned out to be the sort of introductory line she appreciated. We spent the rest of the day together, during which I discovered that a lot of St. Pauli Girl beer was what the doctor ordered for octopus bites, and also that she was an anthropologist, was working at a big public hospital in Miami, and had recently returned from a trip from Algeria to Nigeria by car in company with a well-known black writer. This person had apparently gone nuts, seized upon J. as a symbol of white oppression, and arranged for a local sorcerer to curse her. She subsequently became gravely ill, and had to be yanked from death’s embrace by her family.

I had not previously met anyone who’d been ensorcelled, so I was fascinated ? never mind that I was spending my days deep within the scientific paradigm, in which such things were not allowed. We became close friends in Miami during the time I was finishing my degree, and when someone broke into her house and assaulted her, she asked me to move in as a sort of bodyguard. J.’s job at the hospital was working with people who’d been afflicted by sorcery, not normally a Medicare-covered treatment modality, but fairly common in Miami at the time. I hung around the fringes of the santería-voudoun world with her and observed a number of phenomena not easily explained by science. By this time it was clear that I was not about to set the world of biology aflame ? not many people were interested in octopus behavior ? and so after the university grudgingly gave me a doctorate I departed for a job as a restaurant cook.

Shortly thereafter, J. and I got married, although not to each other, and I started working for the county manager as a criminal justice analyst. I got to know a little about cop work and battered kids, and a lot about the peculiar ethnic politics of the Magic City. Then I went to Washington and spent twenty years as a government drone, while moonlighting as a ghostwriter ? political speeches and a line of thrillers.

The last thread: my wife was working as an art teacher in an inner city school and she told me about a young black girl in her class, a brilliant artist but subject to fits of uncontrollable rage. It turned out that she had been adopted by a white couple, decent people, but without a clue about what was driving their daughter crazy. About six months after I heard this story, I grabbed an old bound scientific notebook off a shelf, turned to some blank pages and began to write, unusual because I never compose in longhand. I wrote in what seemed almost automatic writing far into the night. In the morning, I saw that I had a story about a white woman in hiding from something that happened in Africa, and from her husband, a famous black poet, and trying to protect a battered black child she’d rescued. It looked like the first chapter of a novel. I was dying to find out what happened next and so over the next two years I wrote Tropic of Night. Magic.

— Michael Gruber

About the Author

MICHAELGRUBERis a Seattle-based writer with a Ph.D. in biology. This is his debut novel, although he has ghosted several New York Times bestsellers.

Credits

Jacket design by Marc Cohen

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint:

The epigraph, which is from Local Knowledge by Clifford Geertz. Copyright Š 1983 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, L.L.C.

Excerpts from “Jeannie C.” and “The Flowers of Bermuda” by Stan Rogers Š Fogarty’s Cove Music. Used by permission of Ariel Rogers.

Lines from “A Lullaby” by W. H. Auden, reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought by Henry J. Drewal, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun, published by the Museum for African Art. Used by permission of Dr. Rowland Abiodun.