“What do you want to do, little spirit?”
Behind me, Sophie clung to the back of my shirt. Was I failing the test? I remembered how I had got here, by recognizing how much was invested in me. Now I realized how many people believed in me. Yet here, in the crisis, I was once again asking someone else to command me.
I spoke strongly. “I want to guard and protect my own.”
“But can you serve? Did you learn how to serve?”
I looked him in the eye. “With discretion, yes.”
He laughed at that. I didn’t laugh with him. “Si bon. Let us see how well you protect.”
Every nerve in my body turned to ice.
But he strode away across the circle to the nearest limestone slab and picked it up one-handed, as easily as I might pick up half a brick in the road. He turned the slab, moving his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, examining the stone from all sides, and then set it down.
He did this with every other slab in the circle, though each one was five feet long and weighed at least half a ton. Then he returned to us under the lights. “Si gro bon,” he said. “You do know how to consecrate and protect your place.”
Was that what I had done? My skin prickled. I’d done it the way a dog guards the perimeter of his property. And what did you just do, lord? I took a deep breath and let it out.
“I want also to ask you a question,” I began. Here goes.
“You would challenge me? Well, you are strong in your worshippers. You have a right.”
“What do you mean? You—you made me,” I stammered. “I have no worshippers.”
The Baron only smiled a puzzled, quizzical smile. “Ask your question.”
Anger strengthened me. “Why have you parted me from my home for so many years, if I was meant to guard and protect it?”
Samedi clapped his hands together, applauding with a sound like rolling thunder, spraying cigar sparks into the air.
“That is the right question!” He pointed at me. “Attend. A jam bois has roots in one place, little spirit. He guards and protects his own. Who are your own? You think they are a pack of rich whites across the ocean. But what about your other family?”
“But—but we—Jake and I traveled everywhere. I protected him always.”
“And everywhere you went, you stayed a little while. Just long enough to put down roots.”
At that phrase, I shivered. I could feel my desire to stay somewhere like a throb at the base of my spine. I’d been torn up by the roots many, many times.
Samedi’s voice sounded deeper in Henri’s chest. “Here, there, a few weeks, a few months, in places where vagabons dwell. The meek, the many, the poor, the silent. They are mine.” In that voice I heard the power of Samedi’s possession, his love for his own. “Through your travels, they have become yours.” The lwa’s voice dropped again. “Now here is what you will do.”
Samedi took one puff on his cigar, bent, put his hands on his knees, and looked down at me. He seemed twelve feet tall.
Sophie tightened her grip on the back of my shirt.
“You will make pilgrimage to all those places. You will consecrate them as you consecrated this place tonight. You will promise your protection to the people there. When they call upon you, you will come. This is your obligation. Promise it.”
Fire poured through my blood. “I promise it.”
Sophie thrust herself between us. “And I will protect him.”
Samedi nodded. “Yes, you should always defend your bois. The spirit should defend it, but the people who live there are obligated to defend it as well.” He put one big hand on Sophie’s shoulder and one on mine. I smelled the hot glowing tip of his cigar charring a hole in my linen shirt.
He laughed and clonked our heads together, mine and Sophie’s.
He looked out into the darkness under the trees. “Li se konplé.”
And then he was gone.
YONI
I started my second act feeling numb. That lasted three songs. The anger came back on “What Have You Done.” I blasted straight into “No More Cowards,” taking no prisoners. I poured it all through the microphone. Take that, Uncle Chester, and take that, Baz! I hoped they could hear me.
Max was hitting the drums harder than necessary.
I noticed Jimmy giving me funny looks.
All sounds were too loud tonight—was it my ears doing the oversensitive thing again? I was definitely tired. Then my eye caught the audience monitor stage right.
People in the orchestra rows were yelling at each other. A fistfight broke out in the front row. Then another.
My sound man cranked us up to cover the noise.
That brought me up short.
I was passing my horrible mood along to everybody.
I signalled for another lightning change in the playlist and asked Jimmy to start up “Pray For Peace.”
The band knew it was time for an emergency intermission when we did “Pray For Peace.”
I sang it on empty, feeling drained, as if everyone in the audience had a sharp straw and they’d stuck it into me. If they don’t like the taste, they can quit sucking me dry, I thought bitterly, and then was ashamed of myself. I was betraying them.
All I wanted was for Baz to show his ugly face. I had a sickening feeling that he was in the same mood I was, and it made me more miserable to think I might be so contagious that he might feel like this in his pigsty up on Ravenswood Avenue. I almost didn’t make it through the last line, “Begging—begging for peace.”
I was stumbling for the wings before the curtain had quite hit the deck.
I hadn’t been in my dressing room twenty seconds when the door burst open. David fell into the room, wrestling with a medium-size guy with long skanky white dreads.
“That’ll do,” I snapped. “David, out.”
David let go of the intruder.
“And keep everyone else out of here. Everyone,” I said in my boss voice.
David gave me a worried look and left.
Baz stood, panting, wiping blood off the corner of his mouth.
I faced him.
He said, “I don’t have time to grovel. You have to do a mood adjustment, baby.”
My mouth fell open. “You dare? After what you said last night?”
“One of my guys just tried to hang himself downstairs.”
“You—dammit—wait—what?”
Baz detoured around the mangled chair in the middle of the dressing room, giving it a nervous look, and took an undamaged chair. He sat down with a bump, as if he was winded and tired and on a mission. The look he gave me told me that King Ashurbanipal wasn’t totally dead in there.
“Yell at me later. I’ll bend over. You can kick me around the block. Later. But you have to fix the vibe now,” he said, intense. “There’s thirty-eight hundred people out there. I don’t want any suicides on my crew—or in my parking lot. I’m serious, Yoni. You’re gonna kill somebody.”
It was the only thing he could have said that would stop the fishwife scream rising in my throat.
I started to think like a pro again.
“Is somebody with him? Your guy downstairs?”
Baz nodded. “I got your medic to sedate him. He’s with him now.”
I stared at my makeup table without seeing it, feeling for my edges outside the dressing room, out on stage, out in the house, all the way up to the top balcony.
I tuned in to the audience’s emotion and flinched. They were starting to yell out there. The feeling was . . . ugly.
“Okay,” I said slowly. There was only one way I could fix my vibe, and I needed help with that. If Baz would meet me halfway.
It was weird that I wasn’t scared to ask him for help.
I don’t ever ask for help. I order it.
I raised my eyes to his. “Can I ask you some questions? I can’t go back out there yet. Please?”
His pale eyes went wary. He nodded.
“Why did you come here tonight?” I said. My throat sq
ueezed like a fist around the words.
He let out a long, long sigh. “It’s my job. I’m here to fly you.” He didn’t sound defensive, now. He was his old, slumped, tilted, relaxed self. Then he smiled, and my tight throat softened. “I’m proud of you.”
Just being near him was making me start to melt inside. Not good. The show was far from over. “Because I blew off the biggest special effect in the show?”
“Yep.”
That made me glow. A reluctant smile came up and I stifled it. “That’s number one. Number two. What the hell was that last night? You had nothing to do with that photograph.”
He bit his lip. “Do we have to do this now?”
“Yes. Or I can’t get the vibe of this show back on course.”
His head bobbed, like, okay. “You’re not gonna like this.”
“I don’t expect to.” That was a lie. I was experiencing wave after wave of relief that he was here, talking to me. The fact that he was here at all made my legs happy-rubbery.
I pulled up a chair and sat down. “You may now annoy me.”
“Okay. The thing is, your goddessness, you don’t need me. I’m actually a liability in this picture. Your family is scared I’ll corrupt you. And frankly I think you’re scared I’ll corrupt you.”
I frowned. “I am not.”
“Oh, I think you are. You can barely take an afternoon off without feeling all shivery with guilt, a big, yummy, pint-of-ice-cream, regret-it-in-the-morning guilt.”
My skin was going cold with exhaustion. That was so not-good. To do the rest of this show, I needed to ride the high all the way to curtain, or I’d collapse early. It had happened before.
I rolled my eyes. “Okay, maybe I feel a little guilty. So?”
“So you’re not really ready for a rest.” He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees and looked at me over his big, relaxed paws. “But I am. The truth is, this work makes me tired, babe. You can handle this crazy schedule, the pressure to win, the endless work, the media on the back of your neck like a plague of fifty-pound mosquitoes. Me? I’ve been on vacation more or less continually for twenty-seven hundred years, except for a brief, loony interval when I had the band. I’m still tired from that.”
Some of what he said was true. I opened my mouth to say so, and he put up a palm.
“A big part of the machine that makes this job possible for you is your family. They’re not my favorite people, but you need them. What’s more, they know I don’t like them. They know that if I hang around much longer, it’ll be them or me. It’s reasonable for them to defend their jobs.”
I put my hands over my eyes. He was only telling me part of the truth, but he was right—it was the part I didn’t want to hear. “They’re not acting reasonable,” I said around my hands.
“C’mon. You said yourself, you are this company. You run it all. You sign the paychecks.”
“They’ve kept me lonely, Baz.” If I hang around much longer. Did that mean he would—that he wanted—? My chest ached.
He didn’t speak.
I tried to press my swollen eyeballs back into my head. “They’ve chased away every guy I met for the past ten years. After I took another look at that picture, I did some thinking. Remembering. They know I want a bub—a bub—”
Then I fell apart.
His warm hands made me stand up. I hid my face against his neck. He patted me very gently on the back.
“Pull in the edges, babe. Pull it all in. This is just for you and me right now.”
I pulled it in. The sadness tightened around me, and then it softened as his heat soaked into me. My mood must be getting better. I pulled the energy close like a blanket. I made some privacy around us.
That felt really, really nice.
When I could breathe normally, I looked at the audience monitor in the corner. It was hard to tell, but I thought they were beginning to simmer down.
“And now.” I gulped. “Number three.”
He went still in my arms. “Yeah, I know.”
We both knew what I would ask for. And he still hadn’t told me the whole truth about last night.
“Can you do the new song tonight? ‘Baby Come Home?’”
He looked at me with such pain in his eyes, I wanted to take it back.
But I needed him.
“So here’s a deal. Come out there and do the song we did last night, same way—slow for the first encore, you get offstage quick, then we do three or four fake finales, and then you come back out and we play it fast. Just for tonight?” I pleaded, but I felt rotten. “Because I’ve messed up this show with my crappy mood, and we don’t want any suicides tonight. I have no right to ask.”
“Oh, I don’t know. You might.” He tilted a little.
My heart jumped. “If it will hurt you, we won’t do it.”
He held my gaze. “But it would fix the vibe.”
I slipped my hands into his. “What happened last night, Baz? You were great, you were taking bows, and then you stiffened up and keeled over. You broke a key off your bass. It seemed like you never did come out of it, even after Uncle Chester came in ranting about the photograph.”
“Please don’t make me take the bows.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s not an answer,” I said.
“I know. But it’s a Band-Aid. It’ll get me through the show.”
“‘Just a little pinprick?’ Baz, I won’t hurt you again like that. Whatever it did to you. I won’t.”
This was it, the big secret, the reason his music career had ended.
I was afraid he wouldn’t tell me.
I was afraid he would.
“Make you a counter-offer,” he said. “We do the song, you fix the vibe, I get to back offstage before the bows, and I’ll—” He took a deep breath. “I’ll tell you all about it later. After the show.”
I thought of the job ahead: Fix the vibe, get through the show, get somewhere where we can be alone, and heal him.
I said, “That would work. You can leave the building if you have to. And later, you tell me.”
He nodded bravely. “Deal.”
My eyes stung. “But if you croak on me, there won’t be a later.”
“I never croak.” He lifted my hands and kissed my palms, left and right. “There will always be a later.”
VEEK
Et voilà, the man before us was Sophie’s father again. He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at it with interest. “Where did that come from?”
“You were possessed by Baron Samedi, Papa.” Sophie seemed awed. “He spoke. He laid commands on us. You have been a vodou horse!”
“Nonsense,” Henri said. But I noticed he looked toward the trees beyond his pile of shopping bags.
“He was—you were—he was huge!” Sophie’s eyes went round. I squinted at her in suspicion. She hadn’t been so impressed when Samedi spoke to us through Jake. She gasped, “You were magnificent, Papa! C’est incroyable!”
Then I saw what she was about. My clever Sophie!
My cousin Henri darted a glare between the two of us and the trees. He pointed at us with the cigar and then put it in his mouth again. “Stay here. Don’t move.”
We stood still. As before, I didn’t try to fight his compulsion—but I didn’t accept it, either.
He ran to the edge of the circle and stood on one of the stone slabs. From there he reached up into a tree and brought down a video camera festooned with duct tape. This he carried into the circle, thumbing the controls, with Samedi’s cigar sticking out of the corner of his mouth.
Sophie squeezed the back of my arm. I didn’t look at her. We waited while her father watched the playback.
A strange voice made small by the camera cried, “Who is this horse I am riding?”
The man who would be vicomte gasped. He nearly dropped the camera. He carried it under one of the bright lights and watched again, his face changing ludicrously from astonishment to alarm to delight. He ran to the limestone slab by t
he tree and examined it. His raincoat, which he had removed and laid in the grass, was half-trapped under the slab. He tugged at it futilely. There was no moving that slab. Then he ran from slab to slab, exclaiming as he found that each was a little off from its original place, turned or tilted or sunk deep in one corner where Samedi had dropped it.
“Mon Dieu. Mon Dieu. I did this. I did this,” he repeated.
Sophie and I exchanged glances now. I shrugged.
She said, “No, Papa, you did not. It was Baron Samedi. Veek called him, and he came.”
“But he possessed me,” her father breathed. “I thought it would be the nègre here. Mon Dieu.” He looked at me. “Do it again. I’ll put the camera back. We’ll do it again!”
I thought it was time to show my hand at last. “That’s not how you treat a gede.”
Henri put his free hand into his coat pocket. “Say the prayer. Do the thing with the spray paint.”
“The Baron doesn’t come when you ask. He comes when he wills.” I folded my arms.
“He’ll come when I will!”
I shook my head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But Henri didn’t seem to be paying attention. “I’ll learn. I’ll pay them to teach me to call your Baron, and he’ll come again. This power is mine! You can’t stop me from getting it! Then you’ll bend the knee to me, when I am Baron”—he snapped his fingers—“who you said—”
“The vodou people will teach you,” Sophie volunteered. “For a price.”
“Pff!” Her father waved the price away. “I can afford it. How long is the training?” He paced back and forth eagerly, holding the video camera in both hands, thumbing the controls. “Can I do it while I’m doing my work? Or must I go to New Orleans like my ancestor?” He told Sophie, “You can marry the banker’s son. He’ll run the companies for me. Then I’ll be free to—ah!” He broke off in satisfaction as a cell phone rang.
Sophie was sputtering indignantly. “I’m marrying Veek!” she cried, sending the hairs sticking straight up on the back of my neck.
“Nonsense.” Henri fished out his phone. “Yes? Yes, well, what’s the result?” His face darkened. “What?”
Sophie flung her hands in the air in triumph. “It’s a match!” She danced on her toes. “It’s a match! A match! Veek is the vicomte!” she shrieked.
Walking on Sunshine Page 29
