I
wake up already tussling with the problem of the ngks and their lethal naked benefactor. The whole situation seems to just be sitting there as I come around, an ugly, uninvited houseguest. Also, I’m hungover, but that was expected. All the way through my morning routine, out the door, and down the street, I’m pondering how the little cretins do what they do and how we can stop them. In my mind, there is the one homicidal halfie, killing a soulcatcher and Moishe in one fell swoop. He’s surrounded by a grim constellation of ngks, all panting and biking away, and those horrible shrieks bursting through the air like sparklers. Somewhere nearby is Trevor and his weirdo plot to bring some college kids into the Underworld. Sasha’s a little farther off, all sleek and fragrant and sorrowful at that table of hers in the Red Edge. Surely lines stretch between them all, but I have no idea how.
I find Riley in a similar mood. He’s standing over an ancient wooden table on the second floor of Mama Esther’s place, puzzling over some papers. “What I can’t . . . quite . . . grasp,” he says by way of a greeting, “is what the fuck kinda sick magic that naked halfie was dealing in.”
It warms my heart actually. Besides hunting, this is
when Riley and I are at our best. Seems yesterday’s defeat has thrown us both into strategy hyperdrive. That, plus the Council’s probably all up in his ass about it. “Been working the connection with the one I took out on New Year’s,” I say.
Riley looks up. “Anything?”
“Only that the one was trying to bring the living and the dead closer together and the other seems to be trying to take out the dead one by one.”
“Is he? Or is it something else?”
“Like what?”
Riley shoves some papers aside and unfolds a map across the table. “The three ngks so far have been within a four-block radius. Here, here, and here.” I unsheathe a Sharpie and dot the little squares he points to.
“Not unusual for ngks though, right? If it’s an infes—”
“Right, right, but what if that’s why he’s using them? If that’s not an incidental feature of the little creepy guys but the whole point?” Riley thinks he’s onto something, but I don’t see it yet. I’m not even sure if he does. He’s just plunging forward on gut instinct and teasing out the idea as he goes. I’d roll my eyes, but it usually works for him.
“So you think there’s something special he wants to do and he needs the ngks in a cluster to do it?”
“What better way to get into some nefarious shit without the Council being able to touch him? Think about it: he’s got some very old, very nasty magic working for him, yes, but even with all that, certain things take time. And powerful though he may be, he probably can’t hold off a patrol of soulcatchers
and
complete his secret science project at the same time.”
“So he builds an impenetrable barrier against ghosts.”
“Exactly.”
“But what’s the project?”
Riley shrugs. “No clue. Was hoping you’d get that part worked out.”
“Great.”
We ponder in silence for a few minutes, shuffling papers and sipping corner-store coffee.
“Is it weird?” Riley says out of the blue.
I know exactly what he means, but I say, “What’s that?” anyway.
“You know, you’re this one and only for three years, and then all a sudden there’s half-dead guys popping out the woodworks. And they’re launching plots, being freaky, declaring war on the dead and all kindsa fuckery. Just wondering if you got feelings on it.”
“I do.” I almost leave it at that, but then the words slip out of me. “I feel caught between two worlds I don’t under- stand.”
Riley nods and sips cold coffee.
“I mean, that was always true. But now it’s even truer. And yeah, I don’t really know what to do with it. It’d help if the one guy weren’t a homicidal freak.”
“Amen. And it was all so deliberate, the killing. One ghost and that set off our boys, and then the Hasidic guy.”
I put some coffee in me and mull it over. “And the fact that he was looking right at me when he did it is just . . .” I shudder. “You know I don’t get icked out easy.”
“It’s true.”
“But this . . . yeah, it got to me some.”
We settle back into a working silence for a few minutes and then Riley curses. I look up at him. “I don’t know why I didn’t see this before.”
“Hm?”
“If you triangulate the ngked houses”—he drags the Sharpie in thick lines between the three dots—“you get an unpleasant surprise.”
“Mama Esther’s house.”
“Damn skippy.”
“Right in the center.”
“Correct.”
“Damn.”
I
light a Malagueña to ward off this hangover as I trudge along toward Bushwick. It’s a brisk afternoon, the kind you can really get lovelorn over. Today I’m keeping it professional though; my mind still teems with ngks and halfie plots. I’m fast, so there’s still some cigar left by the time I reach Baba Eddie’s.
“You can’t smoke in here,” Kia says when I walk through the jingling door.
“Bullshit.”
She indicates a brand-new NO SMOKING sign hanging above her head. “I’m a growing child, and y’all’s nasty secondhand smoke is fucking up my uterus and lung capacity.”
“Your uterus, huh?”
“If I say so, then yes.”
“Fine.” I head back out the door. “Would you tell Baba Eddie I’m outside?”
“He’s with a client.”
I growl something at Kia, but it gets voided out by the clamor of bells and the slamming door. She smiles and flips me off over the heads of the saints in the window display and then gets back to work.
* * *
“Carlos!” The thing about Eddie’s boyfriend, Russell Ward, is he really looks like your average white dude. He’s pale and has thinning salt-and-pepper hair and a big white-dude grin that comes at you outta nowhere. He’s not white, of course; he’s Indian—like Indian from upstate, not Bangalore—and he used to be on some real hate-whitey shit back in the sixties, from what I hear. He’s some kinda big-deal lawyer now and, according to Baba Eddie, milking the corporate bastards for every cent they have from the inside. I ain’t mad. “What you been up to, man?” Russell says. “I haven’t seen you in forever!”
He gives me a firm handshake and settles in beside me in front of the store. “Life is good,” I say. “No, that’s bullshit. Everything’s a mess.”
Russell frowns. “I’m sorry to hear that, Carlos.” He sounds like a used-car dealer, but I know he really means it. “You want to talk about it?”
“I can’t, really. But thanks.”
We stand there for another minute, and then I say: “You ever feel trapped between two worlds?” Then I face palm. “Sorry, that was a stupid question.”
“No, it’s fine, Carlos. And yes, every single day that I put on this suit and go to work, actually. And every time I walk down the street and someone mistakes me for something I’m not. Also, anytime I step foot back on the rez and get called a sellout. And during certain arguments me and Eddie have had. Yes. Quite a bit actually.”
“Damn.”
“But I’m all right with it.”
“Oh?”
“I’m gonna be fifty-three years old next week, Carlos.”
“Happy birthday.”
He shrugs it off. “Yeah, yeah, whatever. The point is, I could give a fuck what people see me as now. Does it still vex the shit out of me when someone calls me a cracker? Of course, especially if I haven’t gotten my mochaccino yet.”
“I’m sure the mochaccino does wonders for you not looking white.”
Russell rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean though. There’s moments, sure. There’ll always be moments. But in the grand scheme of things, I know what the fuck I am. The one man I truly give a fuck about knows what the fuck I am, and the Creator on high
definitely
knows what the fuck I am. So what the fuck do I care about anybody else?”
He makes a good case for not giving a fuck. I’ll give him that. “You ever feel like you might one day have to pick sides?”
“Oh, like the apocalyptic race war? Let me tell you something, Carlos: that shit’s been going on every single day since the country was born and long before that too. People walking around waiting for it like it’s gonna be some moment, us and them, but no: war is the constant state of things. Slow fucking death. We’re just trying to squeeze out whatever little slab of peace we can find. You feel me?”
I nod, regretting slightly that I unleashed the rampage. But instead of going on, Russell just stares at me for a few seconds.
“What is it?” I ask.
“This is usually the part where, having listened to what I have to say, you then share something.”
“Oh.” I forget how these things work. I think for a second, then shrug. “I really have no fucking idea what’s going on.
All I know is: I ain’t really this and I ain’t really that. I don’t know if I believe in God, but if there is one, I feel like he or she or whatever is fucking with me right now.”
Russell nods. “Sounds about right. God’s good for fucking with a man. We get our britches in a wad about it, but usually? That shit ends up pointing us exactly where we need to go.”
“I guess . . .”
“And you wanna know something else . . .” It’s a demand, not a question. “They took me aside one time, when I went back to the rez and I was all fucked up. I was a complete alcoholic, to tell you the truth, and a fuckup in general at life. And that’s not even to mention the fact that I had one foot in the closet and the other on the dance floor.” He belly laughs. “Anyway, yeah, they took me aside, some of the elders. We call them elders, you know, not senior fucking citizens, where I come from, because they’re people and not cheap boxes you check off to get a discount on your car insurance.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, they were like, ‘Look, Russell, this can go one of two ways: you can continue to fuck up your life and die in a sniffling pool of your own self-centeredness’—I’m paraphrasing, of course.”
“Of course.”
“‘Or you can embrace that wild enigmatic complicated bitch that is your destiny and ride it into the motherfucking sunset.’”
“Damn.”
“Again, paraphrasing.”
“Right.”
“They said the Creator made certain ones of us look white for a reason, that we had a mission: to infiltrate the
white man’s world and find out what we could, right? Because the fact is, a white dude will tell my pale ass some shit he won’t even tell your pale-but-brown ass, just on the sheer fact that I pass much more than you do, Carlos. It’s just a fact of it. And I can complain about it, because it’s easy to fall into bitterness when you got white people in your ear talking about all their twisted fears and fantasies, trust me. But now it’s ordained as such. There’s a reason for it. The Creator wants us to use our complexness for the good of our people. Reconnaissance. You feel me?”
I nod because I do, I really do. I’m not sure how it applies to my life yet, but I definitely feel him.
“And I was like, fuck: I have a mission. A divine motherfucking mission, no less. All right.” Russell struts a few times and adjusts his slick blue suit like he’s just now coming into the glorious realization of who he is. “That’s some shit I can deal with. Let me tell you something.” As if I could stop him at this point. “I never drank again. I sold all my coke.”
“You sold it? Most people just flush it.”
“I’m a businessman.”
“Understood.”
“And I never looked back.”
“Damn.”
Russell nods endearingly and swoops into the store on the wings of his own self-generated momentum. I stand there for a few seconds trying to puzzle out whether the dead are the white people or the Indians and then Baba Eddie pokes his head out. “You wanted something, Carlos?”
“Oh, yes! No. Wait . . . Hang on.” I’m all turned around from Russell’s speech.
“Hanging.”
I see Eddie make for his pack of smokes and stop him. “Wait—let’s go inside.”
He looks disappointed but shrugs and leads me to the back room. Baba Eddie divines with a bunch of cowry shells, a piece of chalk, and a pebble, from what I can tell. I’ve never actually gotten a reading from him, but I get the feeling he knows what he’s doing. His reading room is tiny, possibly a converted broom closet or bathroom, with a little foldout table and a chair on either side. A Ferrari calendar from 1993 hangs on the wall as if it belongs there, and there’s a little shelf with various spiritual knickknacks in the corner. That’s about all that could fit in the place anyway.
“You want a reading?” Baba Eddie says with a mischievous grin. Maybe one day I’ll get one, but this isn’t the moment. Part of me just doesn’t want to know what kind of spiritual mess is going on with me right now; I think it’d be too depressing. Part of me just can’t be bothered.
“I’ll let you know.” I take a seat in the client’s chair. “Things’ve gotten hairier.”
“Hairier than ngks in Mama Esther’s hood? Do tell.” Baba sits in his spot and listens attentively as I run down the events of yesterday, glazing over certain details around the Amanda situation. When I finish, Baba just sits glumly for a few ticks of the clock and ponders.
“That is hairy,” he finally says.
“Indeed.”
“Riley thinks the guy’s building something?”
“Well, plotting. Maybe building. We have no idea, to be honest.”
Baba Eddie lets out a sustained
hmmm
and unconsciously fondles his cigarettes. “I wonder.”
“Do you wonder something in particular or just wonder?”
“I wonder . . . I wonder if this character, this naked
fellow, is actually trying to get your attention more than anything else.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yes. You said his massacre had an air of performance to it, no?”
“Well, he waited till we were all there, certainly. And”—I shiver a little somewhere deep inside—“he looked me right in the eye when he did the real estate Hasid.”
“See. He could’ve killed you, no?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that necessarily.”
“He certainly could’ve tried. Had ample opportunity. But instead he killed someone in front of you.”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“He was showing off,” the santero says with finality. Then he puts a menthol in his mouth.
“If you light that, Kia will fuck us both up on behalf of her uterus.”
Baba Eddie nods, showing a generous amount of restraint toward his young office manager, in my opinion.
“And this other partially dead fellow—Trevor, you called him?”
“Yes.”
“A minion of some kind, perhaps. Maybe even a reluctant one.”
“Why reluctant?”
“He also could’ve at least attempted to kill you, save his own life. Was he even armed, Carlos?”
That hadn’t really occurred to me in the frenzy of the moment. I’d just been glad the kill was clean. “No,” I admit.
“There’s a missing piece to this equation.”
Sasha. “You think?”
“No doubt.”
“Eddie! You comin’?” Russell calls from the front. “Reservation’s for eight. I don’t wanna be fuckin’ late.”
Baba Eddie rolls his eyes and stands. “Such a poet, that one. The trials and tribulations of a domesticated santero, Carlos. I swear . . .”
“True love is a feisty bitch.”
“You have no idea.”
“I really don’t,” I say and follow him out through the curtain.