Tropic of Night (57 page)

“It could. I don’t know. Let’s go back, shall we?”

They walked. He took her arm when she stumbled once on a loose plank, and held on to it, enjoying the warmth of her through the thin wool.

“Say, Jane? Are you ever going to tell me what you did in there with Barlow? And the deal with the room and the candle?”

“How patient you’ve been!” she said, half laughing. “You’ve been dying to ask me all this time. And the secret answer is … I have no idea. Really. There was a grel in control, obviously, as the Olo believe is the case with nearly all crazy people. There’s a ritual, a mental and emotional preparation you do, augmented with drugs. I think I actually mentioned it in the journal. I invited the grel into me, locked it down, and blew it out when I was alone. The pros use a chicken, but I didn’t have one, so I used me. The candle … I don’t know exactly what the candle does. You toss a pinch of fanti, that’s that brown powder, into the candle, you chant a little, and the grel is out of you and off in grel -land. Sorry if that’s not very satisfying, but I’m pretty much a rote-knowledge sorcerer. Think of an Indian in a clearing in Amazonia somewhere with a portable TV and a satellite feed, watching the Super Bowl. It works, but does he know how? Does he understand what he’s seeing?” She paused. “What’s your name? I mean is it really James?”

“Iago. Which don’t work so good in the schoolyard. So, Jimmy.”

“Is that what your mother calls you?”

“When she’s feeling okay. If not, it’s Iago, or worse.”

“We sorcerers like to call things by their right name, so if I may, I’ll call you Paz. Luz and Paz, light and peace, my daughter and my … detective. And ally.”

“Is that a good omen?”

“It better be,” she said.

Igo out and sit on the landing, and I recall the night when Dolores came out into the garden in her T-shirt and heard the mockingbird and time stopped and she started to be me again. Now it is just that moment when, as the Arabs say, a white thread can just be distinguished from a black one. The garden is monochrome, the air utterly still, not a whisper, the air poised after the death of the sea breeze; the foliage is monumental, as if cast in metal, and at this, the lowest temperature of the day, all the water has been wrung from the humid air and plated out onto every smooth surface, like a glittery varnish. I reflect that this may be the last dawn of my life, and I find that I’m not afraid of death. I’m only afraid of being eaten, like my husband was.

The moment passes. In two eyeblinks, there is color again, Polly’s roof is red, the hibiscus is pink, and the sky is pale blue with the big clouds starting their usual tropical morning pileup overhead. The birds begin their morning flittings and twitterings, and the first zombie shuffles into the yard, like a meter inspector on a route, and walks back into the shadow of the croton hedge. I wave to it in a friendly way. Time to work.

I dress in my painter’s overalls and a T-shirt and walk up the stairs. Luz is still sleeping. I sit on the edge of her bed and look at her, as the day slowly drifts into the room. If Witt and I had conceived a child, she might have been a slight bisque-colored creature like this. If one believes, as I suppose I must, in the primacy of the psychic world, perhaps Luz is that child, spiritually, a brand snatched from the bonfire of my late marriage. The Olo believe that the guys up there in m’arun are pretty smart, and when they want something to happen, it happens, and never mind the molecules. I confess it: I tried, that last season in New York, to get pregnant anyway, but it never took. Yet here she is: ga’lilfanebi lilsefunité tet, as they say in Olo?soul love is stronger than blood. I have to believe it. She wakes, not with a start, the way I do, but slowly, like a flower; my eyes are the first thing she sees, supposedly a good omen too.

But the first thing she says, her eyes going to the Burdines shopping bag standing on her night table, is “Did you fix my costume?”

I have not, lazy slut and bad mother. I apologize, she sniffles. We go to Providence. Ms. Lomax volunteers to do the costume. She takes the Burdines bag from me, at the school door, looking at me strangely.

Then I go and spend a very large amount of money. I buy clothes and supplies, and, for seventy-eight thousand dollars, the Guitar schooner. I survey it myself. It’s old but in great shape, all the latest gear, a rich man’s toy. I arrange with the kid who watches it to have it stocked with groceries and gas for a month on the water, and also to have the name painted out and changed to Kite . I change myself, too, a haircut in the Grove, and I slip into an elegant cream linen pantsuit and a straw hat.

By now it’s midafternoon. I have not slept in, what is it now, three days? There was the night at the ile, and then the night when Paz came and took me to dinner and we had our cruise on the bay, and then I took the grel out of Barlow, and then last night and now it’s now. I take a seat at a restaurant overlooking Dinner Key, and order a banana daiquiri in memory of Mom, whose favorite drink it was, and for years virtually her only sustenance. I watch people, I meet eyes, I attract admiring glances. A stylish woman at her ease, alone, a fraud, but they don’t know that; and I find the old Jane has become too small for me, just like Dolores was; a surprise.

The Olo say it was jiladoul, the sorcerers’ war, that underlay the general catastrophe of West Africa, the wars, slavery, the colonizers, the chaos. They may be right; they seem right about so many other things. Maybe it’s starting to happen here, and I feel a pang of regret, even for this city I hate. Do I have the remotest chance? Yes. Weak as I am in myself, there are powers behind me. I think of Eshu standing there in my kitchen when I opened the door to m’arun for the divination, of the orishas descending on Ortiz’s ile . There will be help, I think, if I get it right, if the allies are in place at the time, if I’m not afraid, then the elements will all snap neatly into place, in a manner beyond my understanding, without screws, like my Mauser pistol.

I finish my daiquiri and I’m about to order another when the paarolawats appears. He is (or was, I suppose) a filthy, bearded white man in a fatigue jacket with the sleeves cut off, knee-length shorts black with filth, and combat boots, no socks. His face and the fronts of his shins are covered with small red sores. The tourists don’t see it, their eyes slide away, as they do when they confront its nonzombie brothers in adversity. Maybe he will do something crazy, they are thinking, or demand money. A couple of the waiters are eyeing it, too. Bad for business, this wreck. I pay my bill and leave, toting my elegantly labeled bags. The thing cranks up, wheels slowly, and shuffles after me.

Another one is hanging around the church grounds when I go to pick up Luz at Providence. He’s sending me a message: he’s got me covered. It’s not like him to be so unsubtle and insistent. Perhaps being a witch has ruined his taste.

I’m a little early. The children are rehearsing one of the songs they are to sing at the pageant about Noah’s ark. They are grouped by what sort of animal they are representing and they sing, in turn, the appropriate songs, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Then they all sing the “Navy Hymn,” which I think is fine. It was one of the first songs I ever learned myself. My dad taught it to me when I was about Luz’s age. He will be glad to see she knows it when they meet. Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea .

After, Luz asks me if I know what a peril is. What? I ask. Sharks, she says, in a whispering voice, lest she attract any. We have a paper bag with the famous costume in it. Luz says she will model it for me, tonight. Oh, not tonight, baby.

We go home. We gloat over the new clothes, the toys. I order a pizza, which amazes Luz, her introduction to takeout. I read her Charlotte’s Web until she grows sleepy, and I put her to bed in her new lace nightie. Then I change into another of my new outfits, a green silk shirt and yellow slacks, Ifa’s colors for my big night.

Paz comes by around seven, looking frightened behind his usual bravado. He eyes Peeper in its cage on the table.

“Tell me not to feel stupid,” he says.

I say, “Don’t feel stupid. I see you’re still wearing your mom’s amulet. That’s wise. Also, you have to give me your gun.”

After a moment’s pause, he hands over a Glock 15 and I put it on the high cupboard shelf, with the other pistol and the kadoul . Which I take down and plunk on the table. He looks at it. “What’s that?”

“African magic sauce,” I say. “Would you care for some tea?”

“What kind of tea?” Suspicious.

“Tetley, Paz. Look, you have to trust me here. This”?here I tap the kadoul with my fingernail?”is for me. I’m the only one going into the unseen world. You’re just along for the ride. Like the chicken.”

“I don’t have to do anything?”

“Just be yourself.” Just. And not what you think you are either. The real Paz, please. I make the tea. My hands were shaking earlier, but now the jaw-grinding trembles have passed off. I am on the down slope. I sweeten my tea with sugar, a lot of it.

“What’s new at the cops?” I ask.

“No comment, mostly. They’re leaking that the killer introduced a gas into the A/C of the hotel and that’s how he did it. Knocked out the guards. The same for the craziness that went on last night. Inspired by that cult in Japan, releasing nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. Terrorism. They’re deciding whether to call in the National Guard. Mostly everyone is going around like it’s business as usual. It didn’t really happen in the way that everyone knows it happened. Occam’s razor.” He shrugs. My heart gives a jiggle, he looks so lost.

“Yes, good old Occam,” I say. ” ‘Do not increase causes beyond necessity.’ But what’s necessity? Occam was a churchman; he probably believed God was a necessary cause. And we restrict the phenomena that are eligible for explanation even before we apply the razor. Two guys detect a neutrino and it’s solid science. Ten thousand people see an apparition of the Virgin on a Sicilian hillside and it’s mass hysteria, not worth investigating. The brain is making drugs every second, but the ones that show us neutrinos are kosher and the ones that show us the Virgin are not. We don’t consider the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses …”

He waves a weak hand to stop my flow. “Please, Jane, no more philosophy. I’m hanging on by a thread here.” I stop, abashed. He says, after a while, “I saw Barlow. They got him in Jackson.”

“How is he?”

“He says he feels fine. He thinks what happened was a dream. The last thing he’s really sure about is breakfast the day we tried to arrest your husband. Retrograde amnesia is what they say. I don’t think they’ll charge him, but he’s off the job.”

A car scrunches the shell gravel of the drive and heavy steps sound on the stairs. I get up at the knock. Mrs. Paz is looking grim and businesslike in a white dress embroidered around the yoke with blue seashells. She is holding two heavily loaded shopping bags. When I let her in, she thumps them down and looks me and my place over. I do not expect any compliments. We have a little staring contest, too. Her eyes are much darker than his. In them I read suspicion, fear, pain; she blinks before I do. When she opens up again, there is resignation. She touches my cheek. “Is it true you are made to Orula?” Women are never made to Orula in regular Santería.

“To Ifa? Not the way you mean, but he seems to be interested in me. You’re made to Yemaya.”

“Yes, for many years. She’s given me good fortune, but I always felt that someday I would have to pay back, you understand? I think this is that time.”

He says, “What’s in the bags, Mami?”

“Food.” She indicates one of them with her foot. “Go put it in the refrigerator, Iago.”

“What do we need food for?”

“To eat, afterward, what do you think?” He does what she asks, unloading Tupperware bowls and boxes onto my nearly empty shelves. I offer my dark rum, and all of us have a little ritual drink. No one speaks. Then Mrs. Paz busies herself with the contents of the other bag. She places a little concrete pyramid at the door for Eleggua-Eshu, guardian of the ways. Around her neck she hangs a heavy necklace made of blue and white stone beads, the eleke, and around her right wrist the ide, a turquoise and shell bracelet. On the windowsill over the stove she arranges fan shells set with blue and white ribbons in a plaster base. These are the fundamentos of Yemaya, the depository of the spiritual power of her guardian orisha . She lights incense coils in the four corners of the room and candles made of wax poured into glass cylinders, imprinted with pictures of the santos . Finally, she sprinkles rum in precise directions, chanting. Paz watches all this incredulously. Finally, he blurts, “Jesus, Ma! Why didn’t you tell me you were into all this?”

She continues with her chant, ignoring him. The room fills with the smoke. The chant stops. I seem to smell the sea, now. She says, not looking at him, “You’re an American boy, football, television?I thought you’d be ashamed, you’d think it was an old tata thing.”

“You should’ve told me,” he says, in an unattractive petulant tone.

“Yes, and you should’ve told me about what you were doing, the girls, the sneaking out, God knows what! You didn’t talk to me for years.”

He’s irritated and embarrassed now, the detective made to look a fool in front of me. I want to tell him not to sweat it, that being a fool is the necessary prior for this kind of work, but I don’t, and he snarls something in Spanish and she snaps back and they get into it, too fast for me to follow, but the volume rising. I pick up my jar and step between them and say, We need to start now, and they calm down right away. Yemaya, besides being the sea goddess, is also the goddess of maternity and maternal love, which like the sea is stormy sometimes on the surface, but infinitely deep. These two people are in love and terrified of it.

A loud explosion, far off. We all jump. I look at Paz and I see that he’s not Paz, never was Paz, but my husband. He’s reaching out for me, his hand is going inside my head …

My arm is gripped tight, I feel myself shaken. Mrs. Paz is staring me in the face. She says, “Don’t be afraid.”