Midnight Robber

by Nalo Hopkinson

  It had a mako big hole in the bush canopy in the place where the daddy tree crowns used to be. Tan-Tan looked up at the cerulean blue of the evening sky. Is you do this, you worthless one; is you let the sky into the bush like this.

  All through the new-made clearing the douen people gathered in circles round the weeping stumps of what used to be their daddy tree—waiting, waiting. Some of them had lit their lanterns already. Lantern light, sky light; when last had this part of the bush been so illuminated?

  Finally the last team of douen women had flown back from the sea. They fluttered down to join the rest of the village in the circles. Benta started to rock from foot to foot. Everybody followed suit. Res began a chant deep in his throat, a wail that resembled a douen baby crying. Tan-Tan caught the words for “home” and “food” and “thank you.” The wail got louder. So a child would lament a dead parent. Other douens joined in, some chanting low and passionately like Res, some screaming, ululating, crying. They keened their loss to the sky. Each one was thanking the daddy tree for sheltering them, mourning its loss. The sound filled up the air, pierced into Tan-Tan’s ears like knives, beat against her body like fists and slaps. The baby she was holding woke up crying again. She let him go on this time. Now is the time for him to bawl. Tan-Tan felt say she didn’t have any right to be part of their mourning, but the tree had held her in its arms too. Quietly she whispered, “Thanks. I so, so sorry. Thanks.”

  Slowly the douen wail died down, leaving only the children still sobbing. Next thing Tan-Tan knew, Res pulled out his pissle from his genital flap and peed on the stump in front of him—a green, thick piss that curdled the raw wood wherever it landed. The rest of the douen men did the same, wherever they were standing. The daddy tree stumps were dissolving!

  “Papa God!” Tan-Tan exclaimed. “Is what them doing?”

  *Burying the daddy tree,* Abitefa explained. Her words-them were mushy, for her teeth were falling out as her mouth grew into a beak. Tan-Tan had to strain to understand her.

  *I never see this before, I only hear about it,* Abitefa continued. *Them making the burning water. It go hide the old tree and help the new tree grow in faster.*

  “So then how them does piss without melting down the whole place all the time?” she asked. Kret could have burned off her leg that day!

  *Them body water don’t always burn, only when them wish it to. What Kret do you, he wasn’t supposed to do.*

  “And how it is that no boys ain’t there helping them?”

  *Too young. Boys can’t make the burning water yet, them have to turn man first.*

  Tan-Tan clicked her tongue in wonder. “And we does say a man not a man until he old enough for he pee to make froth.”

  The light of day was almost gone. The men finished their job. All that was left of the daddy tree was a green soup, smelling like ammonia and blood. It made a rank mud on the forest floor. Picking his way carefully round the redolent pools, Chichibud hopped over to his family. Tan-Tan had known him from she was a small pickney. She knew how to read his emotions in his body language. She’d never seen him sadder than this night. But all he said when he reached to them was, “Allyou have any of the tree sap on you? On your foot bottom, anywhere? Wipe it off careful with dead leaf. Don’t touch it! Throw the leaf-them down here so then let we get out of the way. The little teeth coming any minute now; the smell of the sap does call them.”

  Little teeth? Tan-Tan gave the baby back to its father. She made haste and obeyed Chichibud. All round her douen people were wiping any trace of sap off themselves and moving briskly out of the clearing into the tree cover. They clustered together. Nine-ten of the douens dipped some long sticks in the sap and piss soup and made a trail out of the clearing, away from where the rest of the village was standing. Tan-Tan went to stand with Chichibud and them.

  *We safe upwind. We could watch from here,* Benta said. With her beak she gently pulled Abitefa to her, tucked the young douen woman beneath her breast. Abitefa hunkered down into a ball, warm against the deep keel of her mother’s body.

  One-one, more light from lanterns sprang up in the darkness; bouncing, disembodied glows. Tan-Tan remembered the douen myth from back home, about how people could be drawn into the bush by douen lights and the sound of their voices, going deeper and deeper until they were lost for good. And Tan-Tan knew she was lost for true, so far away from herself that she couldn’t know how to come back.

  Nobody spoke. What was going to happen? Tan-Tan asked Chichibud what they were waiting for, but a voice from out of the darkness said in a deliberate, contemptuous Anglopatwa, “Chichibud, hush that tallpeople up, you hear? None of we want to hear she voice tonight.” Pressed down with shame, Tan-Tan clamped her lips together.

  A hissing sound was coming from the darkness beyond them; a hissing that turned into a rustling that became a chittering then a crunching. A bright red wave poured into the cleared space where the daddy tree had been. From the lantern light Tan-Tan could see a gleam here and there of a thousand thousand shiny carapaces: the little teeth. The wave moved closer. Tan-Tan strained to see. They looked like lobsters, an army of scavengers each the size of her hand, climbing over one another in their eagerness to get to the mixture of daddy tree sap and piss. The noise was their feet running, climbing over anything in their way, even their compères. The noise was their mandibles; cutting and biting, tearing up anything that had sap on it and bearing it away: pieces of wattle and daub; daddy tree leaves and branches that had been left behind; a scrap of some hinte weaving; a leg ripped off one of their own; anything, anything. And so them tear it up, is so them eat it.

  Tan-Tan felt a whimper in her throat but she couldn’t hear herself over the noise of the little teeth feeding. She shrank away from the sight in the clearing and leaned up against Benta’s side. She heard an animal scream; the little teeth were taking down a mammal that had been foraging in the clearing and had probably gotten some sap on its feet. The beast was the size of a small dog, but the little teeth bore it down to the ground with the sheer weight of their piled bodies. Tan-Tan couldn’t take her eyes off the roiling mass that hid the beast. It stopped screaming. Seconds later the little teeth that had attacked it were moving on again. Only gnawed bones were left.

  And quick as it start, it finish. The little teeth gobbled up everything in their way, followed the trails of sap out of the clearing, and disappeared into the night bush. The ground in the clearing was bare, but for the bones of creatures that had been caught in their path.

  “The little teeth does leave nothing behind but them guano,” Chichibud said. Is true; in the lamplight Tan-Tan could see the droppings everywhere, little pellets littering the clearing. And then the most astonishing thing of the whole night; as Tan-Tan watched, shoots started to push up through the ground, growing right before her eyes!

  “Koo ya!” she gasped: Look at that!

  Chichibud told her, “Is the little teeth guano doing it. When them eat the sap mixed with we burning water, them guano does cause things to grow fast-fast-fast for a few hours. By tomorrow morning, it ain’t go have no clearing here, just a young new daddy tree. Anybody come looking for we might find we foundry in the middle of all this bush, but it go be just a empty, break-down building. No daddy tree. No douens to hunt. We gone.”

  Chichibud turned to Abitefa and Tan-Tan. “And you two can’t come with we.” The words beat at Tan-Tan’s ears like Carnival bottle-and-spoon.

  “What? Is what you a-say?”

  Abitefa cried out. Trembling, she tried to bury herself deeper under her mother’s body. Chichibud warbled at her, took a step towards her, but Res barked out something and Chichibud drew back. Benta nuzzled her, then stepped away. The ring of douen lights moved away from where Tan-Tan and Abitefa were, pulled closer together farther back in the bush.

  They couldn’t mean it! “Chichibud,” Tan-Tan asked again, “what you telling we?”

  “My job to tell you, for is me bring this misfortune. Is so we does do th
ings, Tan-Tan. You cause harm to the whole community, cause the daddy tree to dead. Abitefa aid you by helping you find Chigger Bite. She shoulda been keeping we secrets, not you own. The two of you too dangerous to carry with we. You going to have to make your own way somehow.”

  In frenzied silence Abitefa was plucking out her new feathers, one by one.

  • • •

  The new daddy tree was man-height now, its treetop beginning to knit together. Its growth had slowed, was no longer perceptible to the eye.

  All round Tan-Tan and Abitefa, douens were sniffing one another’s skin in the way they did for hello and goodbye. They were splitting up into groups, going separate ways. Other daddy trees would take them in. They all knew how to live off the bush; no need to carry much in the way of provisions. Instead everyone was packing what they treasured most: a douen man was squatting on the ground, repacking a wood box full of ironworking tools; a hinte went by with what looked like two tallpeople books in her beak—she must have learned written patwa. Tan-Tan wondered what she made of the alien worlds described in the pages. “Abitefa,” she asked timidly, “what you taking with you?”

  The young woman seemed to have recovered a little from her shock. She opened a pouch round her neck and showed Tan-Tan some pieces of what looked like wrinkled hide, thick as orange rind.

  *The shell I hatch from. When I mate, my partner go carry piece in he genital pouch. My first chick go have a anklet from the rest.*

  Tan-Tan’s belly felt like it was full up of ice. How was Tefa going to find a mate if she was exiled from her people? Is you do this, mash up another life.

  Chichibud came over to them. He extended something to Tan-Tan: her sixteenth birthday present from Janisette.

  “Me nah want it!” The leather scabbard was well-oiled. Chichibud slid the knife partially out so that she could see how he’d kept its edge clean.

  “Is a gift, you must think before you throw those away,” he told her. “You go need it now, the one machète not enough. It could lose, or break. This knife get you out of danger once, remember?”

  “It kill Daddy!” Is you kill Daddy.

  “Yes, it had a cost. Present that could cut will cut. And sometimes the tree need to prune, oui? Take it.”

  She reached out and touched it, shut her eyes against the memories that came with it. That only made them clearer. She opened her eyes again, took the knife from Chichibud, fastened it in its scabbard round her waist, beside her machète. She had to sling it low round the tummy pot she’d developed. The flesh touched by the scabbard crawled.

  “Doux-doux, I sorry too bad it come to this. Maybe your people and mine not meant to walk together, oui.”

  But still is your ratbat pickney you leave me with. “Is all right, Chichibud. I going find a settlement I could stand to live in. Them can’t all be rough like Junjuh, right?”

  “A next daddy tree will take Abitefa in. We will find she again. But I tell she not to leave you until you settled.” He hadn’t answered her question.

  He turned to walk away. They were really leaving her and Tefa here in the bush! Tan-Tan ran to Chichibud and Benta. Tefa beat her to it at a hop, nibbled at Zake’s neck and huddled with her family. Benta cocked an eye at Tan-Tan, lifted one wing. *Come.* And for the final time, Tan-Tan leaned against Benta’s warm side, submitted to Benta grooming her jungly dreadlocks. Then Res snapped out an order and she and Tefa had to separate from the rest again.

  Clusters of douens were abandoning the place: by air; on foot. Tan-Tan and Abitefa crouched together on a boulderstone and watched them leave, group by group. They were all gone by the time the sun had risen. The new daddy tree was some two metres tall. Tefa stood, stretched her arm/wings. *Time to leave here before those tallpeople come back with their killing things.*

  • • •

  You must understand, my darling: Abitefa and Tan-Tan was practically children they own self. They know plenty about how to survive in the bush alone, but not everything. Before too long, the two of them did living in misery: not enough to eat, the rain and dew keep coming in on them through the grass thatch Abitefa weave, and the fire only going out all the time. Them have chigger worms digging into them foot. Abitefa had a sore on she toe that wouldn’t heal, from where a ground puppy had bite she one night when she wasn’t careful where she step. Abitefa was doing all right for food, but Tan-Tan was only eating raw mushroom and whatever fruits she could find, for that she didn’t have to bother to make a fire for. She start to weaken on the poor diet. She belly was running all the time.

  “We can’t go on like this,” she tell Abitefa. “Every time the fire go out, I frighten mako jumbie go come and hold we. We need some lamps and some kerosene. We need grain alcohol to put on your foot, and a shovel to dig a good fire pit, and a axe to cut wood. Too besides, I could kill for some roast gully hen, oui!”

  Tan-Tan convince Tefa to come with she closer to where tallpeople living. “Just for a little while. Just until we scavenge what we need.” That is how them find themselves in the bush outside the settlement named Begorrat.

  • • •

  Tan-Tan didn’t recognise the food crop growing in the fields that circled Begorrat. It was tall with long, scratchy leaves like corn, but the segmented stems were thick as her wrist, bowed with their own weight. She elbowed through it, trying to keep the leaves from touching any exposed skin. She stepped out from between the planted rows right into the path of a young woman about her own age. Her heart fired like a cap gun. “Pardon, Compère.”

  The young woman smiled a tired, friendly smile and stayed where she was, centred and calm. Her brown eyes twinkled, matching the red highlights in the drizzled, unruly hair. Two of her front teeth were cracked. “You have to be careful, eh? Don’t make Boss catch you pissing in the cane.”

  Boss? That was a word for machine servants to use, not people. “How you mean?”

  “You miss lunch. You want some of mine?” She held out a burnt bammy with a bite out of it. “I does take longer to eat, because of the teeth, you know.”

  Tan-Tan tore off a bite of the sticky cake of grated cassava. Somebody had soaked it in gravy to soften it before cooking it on the tawa griddle. The outside was overcooked and the inside was hard, but after weeks of cold food with grit in it, the still-warm bammy was glorious. “Thank you.”

  “Piss does burn the cane roots,” the woman said. Tearing awkwardly with one side of her mouth, she took a bite of her lunch, chewed it cautiously. She made a small noise of pain, stopped chewing. “Can’t eat too good now since Boss lick me in my mouth that time.” She resumed eating. “Me know one-one dead cane not plenty, but me does do it too. Me figure every one me kill is one less me have to cut, seen?” Her conspiratorial grin was warming, her face beautiful, even deformed round the lump of bammy she was trying to consume. Her look appraised, approved what it saw. Tan-Tan grinned back, dashing away a fleeting image of bandy legs in khaki shorts, a head too big for the strong, wiry body it topped.

  “Cane, you call this? Why oonuh want it to dead?”

  A triple whistle blast echoed out over the cane field. The woman turned to look over her shoulder, never moving from the spot where she’d chosen to stand. “Time to get back to work. Me will have to finish eat this as me chop.” She stuffed the bammy into a pouch at her waist. “From I get send to this New Half-Way Tree, me never could learn all you have to do to survive without Nanny, oui? This way, me chop little piece of cane, and mind what Boss say, and me get shelter for me head and food for me body. Some of we saving up we earnings until we could do better, but me ain’t able fight up myself more than so. Where you from, that you don’t know what it is to be indentured?”

  Indentured. A word from her history lessons. “Is what; somebody making allyou work like this?”

  A deep, rumbling woman’s voice was ordering people back to work, calling them lazy, willful. The young woman took Tan-Tan’s two hands urgently, held them hard. The warm touch was startling. Tan-Tan gripped the
human hands that held hers. The woman looked earnestly into Tan-Tan’s face. “Prettiness, me nah know where you come from, but if you have it better there, best you get your fine behind out of this Begorrat Town. For me, this place is my best chance for a stable life.”

  Tan-Tan was only half-listening. The woman’s mouth was plump, shiny with bammy grease.

  Over her shoulder the woman yelled, “Coming, Boss, I coming!” She turned and shambled away. She was dragging one leg; it was hampered by a ball and chain. It had been hidden in the short grass. Gooseflesh rose on the back of Tan-Tan’s neck. She pelted back through the long cane, oblivious of it nicking her skin, to the freedom of the bush.

  All night as she shivered in the chill and dark next to Abitefa her inner voice berated her. What kind of Robber Queen was she, that she just turned tail and ran from real evil?

  In Corbeau she traded her mother’s ring for three lanterns, oil, matches, grain alcohol, an axe, five kilos of flour and two chickens. She watched the last evidence of Ione’s existence disappear into the shopkeeper’s apron. She gave half the flour and one of the chickens to a wizened family living in a shanty beside the trash heap; it was too much to carry, anyway. “Make soup and dumplings,” she told them. “It will stretch for all six of allyou.” The father asked her her name. “Robber Queen,” she told him, before heading back into the bush. Tefa hissed at the way the alcohol burned her toe, but her sore dried up overnight.

  In Babylon A-Fall Tan-Tan stayed a week, having two specially thick blankets woven in return for some manicou she trapped, killed and smoked. She cursed herself for having given away Ione’s ring when she could have used her survival skills to produce goods like smoked manicou to trade.

  She liked Babylon A-Fall. They had no tin box torture. She would go back and tell Abitefa she would stay here. On the day her blankets were ready, she collected them and was going to speak with a woman who had a room she would let. She saw a new headblind exile about to step into the town well. She shoved him out of danger, and got an earful of obscenity for her trouble. And one of her blankets fell into the water. As she was dragging it out of the well, she heard a familiar phut-phut-phut. Open road, nowhere else to hide. She jumped into the well, hung on by her fingers to its edge. Her blanket landed soundlessly again in the water below.