by Paula Jolin
“Don’t you think,” said Miya, “having an unbeliever like me there would dilute the so-called magic?”
Aliya looked straight into those still-damp eyes. “I don’t think you’re an unbeliever,” she said. One last attempt to persuade them: “Obeah. Middle Eastern. Even Japanese. It’s worth a try, isn’t it? What do you have to lose?”
“Everything,” said Gillian. “If this goes wrong . . .” She trailed off. “What are you talking about anyway, we all traipse out to obeah man’s house? What makes you think he’ll even let us in?”
Miya jumped in. “If you’re going to do it, you should do it right where Trevor died.” She brushed her pink bangs out of her face. “I’ve read about the nineteenth-century spiritualists, Arthur Conan Doyle and guys like that, and that’s how they did it, anyway.”
That was, had to be, Aliya’s cue. “It’s right by Firebird Point. The car—well, most of it exploded, but there are still a few pieces of rusted metal poking out of the swamp below.” No one asked her how she knew that. “If Trevor is, I mean if he were, looking for me, for us, anyplace, then that has to be it.”
A rustle and click echoed behind them, and Aliya jumped. Only the cashier, re-aligning the rack of scarves. “We’re closing in five minutes,” she said. “If you want to buy anything.” She shuffled past them, headed for the windows. They watched her go.
“You crazy,” Gillian told Aliya, again.
“I’m not crazy,” said Aliya. Felt Aliya, in her very bones. “If you knew that you could talk to Trevor one last time— that you could ask him what he did with your money . . .” She touched Miya lightly—at least she meant it lightly. “If you knew that you could tell him you didn’t mean it, all the things you said at the party, wouldn’t you do it?”
She didn’t wait for them to tell her that was the whole problem, they didn’t know anything. No one did, no one ever had. “My Great-aunt Reem, she lives in Damascus, she’s old, I mean really old—my mother’s grandmother’s sister. She wears this ratty old housedress and she barely talks above a whisper and practically the only time she leaves her bed is to go to the bathroom. But you know what? She knows about the afterlife, she knows how to contact spirits.” Aliya took a deep breath. A queer feeling fluttered her eyelids and her ribcage and her belly—the same queer feeling she’d gotten when Old Aunt looked over her shoulder: There’s one right there now, up above the mirror—no, don’t flinch, habibti, it’s got to be the blackest night before he’ll talk to you.
“Obeah,” Gillian said. “Some people say—”
The wooden blinds at the front window slammed shut. “We really should go,” said Miya. They headed for the exit: Miya, then Gillian. Aliya had no choice but to follow. The welcome bell ding-a-linged good-bye.
“So this is it?” Aliya couldn’t help asking as she fumbled in her pocket for a bus schedule—she still had to trek all the way back to Kelly Boulevard for her car. They stood in a little circle on the sidewalk. “You guys are just going to go your separate ways? You’re not even going to try?”
Gillian hunkered down inside her coat. Miya said, “It’s been an very adventurous afternoon.”
“I’ll call you,” said Aliya. Exactly what Trevor had said, their very first afternoon, when she’d been so overwhelmed she threw his hand aside and sprinted across the parking lot. She’d looked back though, saw his dark face, that teasing smile. If she closed her eyes, she’d see it now.
She didn’t. She looked at both girls instead, still standing there. She’d win them over.
“All right,” said Miya.
“Text me,” said Gillian.
Behind them, the cashier was locking the door. It sounded like the end of an interview.
TEN
Wednesday night
IndieArabGirl: Hey
Trini_in_Exile: Hey
IndieArabGirl: I was thinking body fluids
Trini_in_Exile: Yuh on crack?
IndieArabGirl: Great aunt Reem told me that things like blood and pee––oh, and feces––are conduits for contacting the jinn. I mean, you can speak to the dead through them. Does that make sense?
Trini_in_Exile: No
Trini_in_Exile: Wait. . .there’s something about blood in obeah
Trini_in_Exile: Soaking white cloths in red blood, I think. Something like that. I’ll have to ask meh cousin
IndieArabGirl: So we should get some, right? For Saturday???
Trini_in_Exile: Gyul, yuh smokin something really potent, yuh think I going into the woods with a bucket of shit
Thursday night
Aliya: So I was talking to Gillian about body fluids—Miya? You there?
[A crackle, some static on the line. Then:]
Miya: Yeah, I’m here. Body fluids? Something to do with Bio class?
Aliya: No, about the whole séance thing. Remember? Saturday night?
Miya: I’ve got plans Saturday night, Aliya.
Aliya: Wait, just listen . . . Did you ever think about the fact that all “dead” really means is that your heart’s stopped pumping blood? Doesn’t that suggest that blood marks the line between dead and alive? That somehow it could be used to bridge that gap?
Miya: [Silence.] It’s an interesting idea. Kind of like the whole alchemy thing—living forever—but in reverse. [Another, shorter pause.] There is something about the idea of certain substances being able to transform the nature of life. There’s a book about this, about medieval texts on the topic and why those scholars weren’t so crazy after all, author has some funny name—something like Dyonsa. I saw it at the library.
Aliya: So you’re in? If you’ve got plans this weekend, how about next Saturday, then?
[A few moments later:]
Aliya: Miya?
Friday evening
SweetnSexyAsianChik: Yeah, she called me.
Trini_in_Exile: Crazy, right?
SweetnSexyAsianChik: Crazy.
Trini_in_Exile: I was talking to meh cousin. . . he said, ‘avoid that obeah thing like shellfish’
Trini_in_Exile: and no, I can’t eat crab
SweetnSexyAsianChik: Yeah
Trini_in_Exile: What he really said was, ‘stay far, far away from that––but I know you won’t cuz yuh plunge head first into everything’
SweetnSexyAsianChik: Really? You seem more like the plan-it-out type to me
Trini_in_Exile: What does he know?
SweetnSexyAsianChik: Seems like this might be your kind of thing then.
Trini_in_Exile: I’m not getting involved with obeah for no reason
SweetnSexyAsianChik: What was all that about Trevor keeping some money for you, that you can’t find now?
Saturday afternoon
The idea that certain substances—blood, for example; urine; feces—have an importance beyond the obvious is one that men have pondered and studied for centuries. These substances often play key roles in rituals of mysticism, shamanism, and the occult, designed to use the cast-off fluids of others to augment an individual’s power. Some cults believe that these fluids make it possible to breach the gap between life and death by offering the dead person the chance to temporarily avail himself of vital life fluids. Others think that the essential roles these fluids play in human sustenance give them sacred powers.
—Martin Dyonsa, A New Look at an Old Practice
Sunday evening
Aliya: You talk to your cousin yet?
Gillian: Nah, man. I’m going out there Tuesday.
Aliya: Let me know what he says.
Gillian: Did I tell you I run into this woman from Chagauramas, living up here on Prospect Road? She swears her ex-boyfriend put a thing on her, and now she has breast cancer. Nothing to mess around with, she says.
Aliya: They all say that.
Gillian: She doesn’t know anything about it, she says. But if she did, she’d wear white: go on Friday night, not Saturday.
Aliya: Friday night it is.
IndieArabGirl: Did you track down the book?
IndieArabGirl: Can you get the pee?
SweetnSexyAsianChik: Me?
SweetnSexyAsianChik: What makes you think I’m even coming?
IndieArabGirl: Gillian wants Friday. I want midnight. Don’t be late.
ELEVEN
IT WAS GILLIAN’S JOB to get the shit.
She snapped her seatbelt into place and started the car. Kids swarmed out of Fillmore High, zipping up jackets, snapping open cell phones, attaching headsets to ears already red from the cold. Up the hill, Miya had almost reached the bus stop, a trail of hopeful freshman boys sniffing at her heels. At the far end of the parking lot, Aliya and her scarfy friends gossiped next to someone’s black Nissan.
Gillian shifted into first gear and joined the line of cars trying to get off campus. Stupid school. You’d think they could find a better way to control the traffic than sending out daily e-mails asking students to please wait patiently and not honk the horn. Only one thing to do: press Play and let the soca carry her through the crowd. The speakers pumped out “Jump and wave,” but the line running through her head was: “Feels like o-beah . . .”
Finally, she was out on the open road, taking I-95 to Lincoln, and then pulling into the lot. She’d called last night, told him to expect her—of course, with Kevin, you never knew. But he was right there in the waiting room when she pushed through the glass front doors, steeled herself for the stink and the noise. Shrimps, man—how could he stand to work here?
“No, no,” he was telling a tall white woman in a flannel jacket. “He’ll be perfectly fine. You can call every day, check in, not a problem.”
“And you’ll put him on the phone? The last kennel he was at, they thought I was being one of those silly old women who thinks of her pet as her child. I know very well Rommel is a dog. But he’ll enjoy himself so much more if he can hear my voice every day.”
“Don’t you worry yourself, we’ll give your boobulups the time of his life.” Gillian smiled. Boobulups—dog must be mad overweight. “Don’t forget, I promise we give him the best Tobago love ever.”
A few more comments, mostly about feeding and one hundred deft strokes with the brush, and the proud owner of the boobulups was out the door. Kevin turned to Gillian. “Pachunks, coming all this way—you don’t expect me to feed you, do you? We got nothing but ground-up horse in this place.” He leaned down, kissed her on each cheek. Stinking like dog, but at least he didn’t slobber.
“Do you think she gets it that you just promised to beat her pup every day?”
“She smoking something, she thinks we gonna give the phone to a dog.” He motioned her to the back room. “You mind coming back here, watching me work? I got Princess Chihuahua having her nails done at four.”
Gillian followed him through the door, down the hall, into the wide back room, where a dozen dogs yipped at the bars of their wire cages. Kevin knelt in front of the one second from the end and rubbed his fingers up against some nose. “How’s your mums?” he asked without looking up. “You hear from her this week?”
Not this week. Not last week either. Of course, Mums had just taken that second job at the roti shop in St. James to help put Dunstan through a computer course. He’d never gone to UWI, and it wasn’t like jobs in Trinidad were falling out of mango trees. Plus, Mum’s foot hot—she was never one to stay home, especially when there was bacchanal going on. The good life, that’s what she lived in Trinidad.
“She’s good, she’s good,” said Gillian. “It’s so expensive to call from there, I keep telling her not to. I call and leave messages on her cell, but she’s so busy nowadays, she probably gets them in the middle of the night.”
“She still dancing with the rum bottle?” Kevin asked. He unhooked the cage, led the tiny dog out by the collar.
“She all right,” said Gillian. She followed the clipped nails and Kevin’s big feet to a six-foot basin at the back of the room.
“And your dad?” asked Kevin, scooping up the dog and turning on the water with one hand. “Did he make it to the game last weekend? I never see a Trini basodee over baseball like that.”
“Why ask about him?” Princess Chihuahua jumped out of the crook of his arm and into the tub, prancing in little circles. So excited she left her etiquette back in her cell and began licking the wall.
“You a hard one, girl,” said Kevin. He said “g-yul,” like the Trini he was. “You the one who wanted to come up here, you forgetting that.” Gillian’s face went hot. She wasn’t forgetting, no matter how hard she tried. Showing the girls on the playground the customized Nikes Dad had sent her from New York. And a swimming pool in his backyard, too, she’d told them, thinking—well, what had she been thinking?
Splash. Water dotted the knees of her jeans, her shins, even her lower thighs, courtesy of Princess rolling along the bottom of the tub. Gillian stepped back. Time to get this over with before she ended up in a wet winter-jacket contest.
“Kevin,” she said. He sprayed the water along the dog’s back, letting her primp herself. “I need a favor.”
Kevin was leaning into the tub, singing, “Bubbling, bubbling, bubbling . . . well, di doggies started jumpin’.” He tipped a generous helping of liquid soap into the water. “Can’t help you, girl,” he said. “I broke like a china dish on a hardwood floor.”
Gillian’s back stiffened. Had she asked him for money so many times, he just assumed she was shaking him down again? She didn’t think so. But talking back wouldn’t get her the shit she needed. She swallowed her anger in a single gulp. “No, nothing like that. Just wondering: that obeah man, the one out on Kelly Boulevard, he for real?”
One quick snort and Kevin was singing about Melda, who wouldn’t have had to bother with the obeah means of getting a husband if she’d just brushed her damn teeth. Gillian let him make his joke, all three verses of it. Then she said, “Nah, man, I mean it. You tell him anything about me? He knew my name before I even said it.”
Kevin stopped singing, stopped moving his soaped-up hands. “You seriously went to see he? Shit, Gillian, what were you thinking?”
“You gave me the address.”
His hands dug deep into fur, stroked the dog up and down, waited her out.
She asked, “You never went to see him yourself?”
Kevin snorted. “Of course not.” He shook his head. “I don’t mess with that obeah thing. Back in Trinidad, when we lived in Belmont, there was an old man up the road, and people would come and go, all hours of the night, but if he did them any good, I never heard about it.”
Nothing to say to that. Kevin massaged the dog up to the ears and back before he spoke again. “Of course, there was Auntie Asha. Remember she? Big hefty woman.” Kevin turned and spread out his arms, soap flying from his fingers. Gillian wiped a bit off her nose. “Then she stopped eating and the next thing we knew, she thin, thin, thin, girl. And sleep? Gorm, man, it was like she forgot how. All night, every night, she wanted to walk. We had to take it in shifts, walking with her, night after night, street after street.”
There’d been stories about Kevin’s Aunt Asha. Gillian wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember. Hospitals that couldn’t help, doctors who shook their heads and shrugged. Late-night candle lightings at Mount St. Benedict’s.
“Auntie’s sister, she was over to see one of those obeah priests, Shaker Baptist, I think he was. ‘You have a sick sister,’ he tells she. ‘Bring she here . . .’ She rushed home and dragged back Auntie Asha, out to Chaguaramas somewhere. And he save she.”
Kevin waved his arms again, but he’d stopped with the dog, so no flying soap this time.
“What caused it?” Gillian asked, finally.
“Her husband’s sister. She wanted Auntie Asha’s money— went to an obeah man and cursed she out.”
“Oh.”
So it works.
Kevin recovered, lunged for the
dog. Too smart for him, Princess padded across the tub. “You crazy, girl,” he said. “Even if the obeah man get you a plane ticket, where you go end up? Everybody home happy happy, your mums meeting you after school with hot cocoa and marshmallow? Nah, it gonna be Mums passed out in her room, and flies all over the kitchen table.”
“Kevin—”
“So your dad’s not trying any too hard, so what? Wait a year, go to college—he’ll pay for you to go away, why not? What you want to go back for, except hard work and no future? You living in a fantasy world, girl.”
Gillian looked down, missed the spray of water heading to her face until it was too late. “Don’t you miss Trinidad?”
“I miss Carnival and Maracas Bay, and Lord what I wouldn’t give for fresh doubles with peppers and hot sauce, stinging me in the mouth on a morning. And come Christmas, I miss me real pastelles, and singing parang for a drink of rum by the neighbors.” Kevin tried for Princess, but she escaped this time, too. “But I don’t miss living hand to mouth, hustling here and there, begging some big shot to let me work. Shit, there’s no money in Trinidad, Gillian—”
“Who cares about money? You Trini to the bone, going on about food like that. If my dad hadn’t lied to me—”
Kevin raised one wet hand, shook it dry. “What you need, Gillian?”
Deep breath. “It sounds crazy, I know it does but—a bucket of too too.”
“Shit, Gillian.”
“Call it shit then.”
He laughed. “We got plenty of too too here. Grab a bucket and shovel your shit.”
THE SUPERMARKET SMELLED like antiseptic even in the meager West Indian aisle, supposed to cater to the local community. Gillian scanned the bottles on the bottom shelf. Matouk’s, but not the fiery habanero version. And the only thing resembling green seasoning was made in America. What did Americans know about cilantro (they don’t even call it chado beni), green onions, big-leafed thyme? Americans, who sprinkled chicken with salt and pepper and called it gourmet.
