Juma

by Madhuri Pavamani

  “You bastard,” she sneered.

  “Dutch?” Avery stood in the doorway watching us as I held the lock of hair in the space between Suleiman and myself. “What are you doing?”

  “Leaving,” I growled as I moved past him to gather my things and head for the portal.

  “You are a fucking asshole.” Suleiman followed close behind, pushing past Avery and into my room, an invasion I could not tolerate as her very presence made my skin itch and every cell in my body want to lash out in most extreme fashion. “You think I want anything to do with you? That I’m attracted to you? Please, get over yourself.” She crossed her arms and laughed.

  “I am hardly a member of your fan club, Keeper Mathew. I like my men to touch me and talk to me when they fuck me,” she spat, her eyes blazing. “You should take a look around some time, pay attention to what’s happening. Heed The Black Copse, instead of being worried about whether or not I’m some sort of James Bond double agent sent by your mommy to spy on you.”

  I threw the last items on the bed into my bag, along with the lock of her hair, and in one fell swoop, grabbed my things, swung around, and pinned her between myself and Avery.

  “Stay the fuck away from me. I won’t say it again. Next time, I’m just going to kill you, no questions asked.” I let her go. She left, but not before tossing back a murderous glare and a middle finger.

  “Grow up, asshole.”

  I laughed and Avery shook his head, as he was so often prone to do when bearing witness to my interactions with others.

  “You have such a way with women.”

  “Fuck her, man,” I groused, changing the grip on my bag. “Stupid cunt.”

  “She’s hardly stupid, Dutch,” Avery replied, “and you should listen to what she has to say about The Black Copse.”

  “Don’t start.” I held up my hand and cut him off.

  “God, you’re a bastard.” Avery almost touched me, then stepped back because like I said before, Juma might have changed me, but only so much.

  “All right, I’m out.”

  So he chose the only other option available to him and moved into the doorway before I could escape. “Hold up, Dutch.”

  I shook my head, somewhat amused by his persistence but also slightly annoyed by it. Every second that ticked by was another one Juma was in Atlanta and I was not.

  “Make it fast, Ave, and not a goddamned word about Veda,” I warned, pointing at him with my cigarette, the smoke clouding the air between us. I dropped my bag and stepped farther into the room, picking up what remained of my bottle of Scout from the side table by the bed. I finished it with one long swig.

  “Fuck Veda.” He smirked as he threw my words back at me. “I want to talk to you about Juma.”

  I knew exactly what he wanted to say about Juma—he wanted to give me one of his big-brother type lectures, the ones where he knew everything and I knew nothing. He was probably going to tell me to stop being so wrapped up in her, she was nothing but trouble, she wasn’t my kind, she was making me lose my focus, that type of shit.

  “I think you need to rethink the whole Juma thing,” he began. I cut him off immediately.

  I moved around him and paused in the doorway—where Juma was concerned, there wasn’t much to discuss. I was going to go to Atlanta. I would find her, and then do everything in my power to make sure she didn’t waste another one of her lives avenging mine in The Gate. There was little point in her waging a one-woman war against generations of greed and corruption and that rat bastard Khan.

  “I know what you’re going to say and you should save your breath, Ave. I love her and it doesn’t matter what she is or what I am, I’m going to be with her, no matter what you, or my family, or anyone else in The Gate thinks. And I’m going to go to my grave protecting her from everything we are.”

  “Dutch.” Avery shook his head side to side, the movement slow and deliberate, as if each turn and sway was considered far in advance, like his body wanted to make sure each step of the motion fit together just so. It was called flow and Avery Lu had plenty of it. “Is that what you think? After all this time of me watching you suffer through your existence, you think now that you’ve found some goddamned happiness, I’m here to ruin it for you? Tell you to leave Juma alone because she’s not like us? God bless her if she’s not one of us.”

  His words settled between us for a few seconds of silence and I reflected on how good he was at making me feel shitty.

  “But this idea of yours to sweep in and save her”—Avery shot me a look, as if to suggest I knew better—“just like Kash said, that woman doesn’t need saving. She’s probably going to wind up saving all of us.”

  “I don’t want her saving us.” I lit another smoke and fumed. “We don’t deserve to be saved.”

  “Let’s not get into the semantics of my statement and whether or not any of us are deserving of a different life, especially when that is hardly my point.” Avery sat on the bed and crossed his legs, a custom-made Italian sneaker resting casually on his knee. Although he appeared the picture of calm I knew him well enough to know he would shake some sense into me if necessary. These were the quiet moments between us, when he allowed me seconds to choose my path, hoping that I would select wisely and he would not be forced to show me the folly of my ways.

  I smoked and watched him and for a few beats everything between us stilled and waited, as if even the walls wondered what I would do next.

  “Agreed,” I finally relented, “our souls are not the point.”

  “No, they are not—she is the point. Or rather what she is doing is the point,” Avery corrected himself. “She is doing what we need to be doing. She is taking down The Gate by attacking the very foundation of the organization, because without an elite force of Keepers, there is no Gate. You know this, I know this, and very obviously, Juma knows this.”

  I started to disagree then reconsidered when he shot me a glare full of caution and warning.

  “Without us, the very function of The Gate ceases to exist—we are the sword instructed by the Junta and wielded by the Ren. We are the blood and guts and backbone, we learn the ways of the Poocha and pass down our knowledge for generations. It is our blood that flows through the veins of each and every Keeper. We make The Gate.”

  “Khan can claim his throne of skulls and think he is The Gate all he wants, but every Keeper in the field knows better. Every one of us knows we are why he and the Ren are able to sit in their glass houses and lead their lives of excess and opulence.”

  “And up until a few months ago, without us—without Keepers—there could be no Ren. Only we could be deadly and cold-hearted enough to hold the office of Ren.” Avery stood and even though he was several inches shorter than me, you couldn’t tell me we weren’t eye to eye. “But that is no longer the case, Dutch. And you might wave off Veda and The Black Copse as something trivial, light and fluffy bullshit, but she is very real and there is nothing bullshit about what she’s doing.

  “More important than the violence they are perpetrating every chance they get, killing anyone who disagrees with their purpose, is the fact they can become Ren,” Avery continued. “Never in our history has the order of The Gate been so disturbed. Never in our history has our place and our significance as Keepers been so threatened. It is this threat we must fight, for it is our only chance at survival, I kid you not.”

  “See, this is where you and I differ, Ave,” I replied. “I don’t give a fuck about our future as Keepers. Fuck us. And fuck Veda, she can have The Gate. I only care about keeping Juma safe. It’s all that matters.”

  I grabbed my bag and turned to leave, stepping into the hall.

  “Dutch,” Avery called after me, “you want to keep her safe?”

  I stopped but didn’t turn around.

  “You better start working with her because right now, she’s the only one making any sense.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Working with her leads to nothing but her
death,” I replied.

  “Working with her leads to our survival,” Avery shot back, “and our survival is the only way Juma and her kind are going to see another day.”

  26: JUMA

  If you’ve never spent a summer night down south, then I’m so sorry for you. And I don’t mean Florida, in some air-conditioned enormous loft condo along Ocean Drive, overlooking South Beach. I mean Mississippi Alabama the Carolinas Georgia. I mean deep-south it’s hot as fuck and the air is thick and I can barely breathe but all of this heaviness lives in my blood flows through my veins inhabits my soul.

  I

  know

  this

  deadly

  magic

  of

  a

  southern

  night.

  I

  am

  this

  deadly

  magic

  of

  a

  southern

  night.

  I stood in rapt silence as my ma remained frozen outside the window of our Atlanta home. The same Craftsman home of white wood, blue shutters and a wraparound porch that begged you to grab a book, a sweet tea, and curl up for an afternoon. The same home she’d shared with my da for decades, where she raised me and painted her watercolors and put her words together to make beautiful poetry, where she loved and laughed and wept and raged. The same home where she spent a morning planting peonies only to realize by late afternoon she needed more to make her flower beds hum with feng shui so she made a quick run to her favorite gardening shop with the intention of returning home in time to have dinner on the table. Only she never got dinner on the table because she never made it home because on that particular day, one Jasper Davis drowned his sorrows in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, got behind the wheel of his truck, and ended the very illustrious life of one beloved Mimi Landry.

  “Oh shit,” my ma hissed into the hot Georgia night as a tear rolled down her cheek.

  I reached out and touched her shoulder to remind her she wasn’t here alone that I would be with her every step of the way but she gently shrugged me off. This moment was all about Mimi and Rufus and the life they built together.

  “He never cleared the table I set.” She turned to me, her eyes full of disbelief. “The goddamned table, Juma.”

  I followed her line of sight to the dining room table and the two place settings that occupied her attention. I cursed myself for not thinking to clear the table that night I settled my da into the house after bringing him home from the hospital, or any of the other nights we shared since Ma’s death, but the fact remained we never went in the dining room and now I knew why: he didn’t want me cleaning it.

  Like the day of her funeral.

  “Da,” I remembered calling out to him all those months ago when I found the stained-glass double doors of the dining room locked.

  “Yes, Juma.” His whisper of a voice had startled me from behind as he ghosted into the room so quiet and still nearly devoid of life. Just the day before he had been smiles and laughter as he discussed his patients and their incessant requests for the ridiculous. But that moment, at those dining room doors, he had seemed . . . scarce.

  “Shit, Da.” I laughed and straightened his tie and pretended he wasn’t a well of despair and I wasn’t fearful of drowning in his depths. “You scared me.”

  A crooked grin almost cracked his lips but the near mirth did not reach his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he replied as he took my face in his large hands and kissed my forehead. I wrapped my fingers around his wrists and for three beats of time we stood still together trapped in his sadness.

  “Why is the dining room locked?” I asked and pulled myself out of his dark waters in hopes of doing the same for him.

  His eyes flashed to the doors and back to mine and for a second I thought I saw panic but it was so fast I convinced myself I imagined it. I let the reality of his glance slide because maybe somewhere in my psyche I didn’t want to know the details of the workings of his lonely brain and what motivated him to lock those doors. Maybe some part of me knew it was better leaving that knowledge with him letting him act the parent accepting my role as child.

  “I’m about to have it repainted and I don’t want any clowns in there making a mess after I spent all week cleaning up the place,” he replied and I knew it was a lie but it sounded so good rolling off his tongue.

  I smiled and squeezed his wrists before releasing him.

  “Ahhhh, you are smart, old man,” I teased and waved a finger in his direction, “because I bet the first thing Auntie Josette and Auntie Anouk will do is swing those doors wide and start setting out a banquet.”

  Da furrowed his brow and considered my words, finding little humor in the impending arrival of my aunties.

  “Thank god I locked those damned doors,” he sighed as he looked through the glass of the French doors and studied the table long and hard, touched my cheek, and left my side. I watched him wander into the garden and sit among the peonies and I figured he needed some time close to his Mimi before we were accosted and embraced by family and friends all desperate to say goodbye to my ma and to our sadness because really, that was the purpose of a funeral—many and varied goodbyes, some full of comfort others nothing but pure selfishness, all of it a toll on the weary souls of those left behind to continue walking this life.

  Now, months later, as I stood in the dark quiet of the Atlanta night, outside the house I knew so well, with a woman of my blood discussing a man we adored, I realized that moment with my da in the garden had nothing at all to do with him being close to my ma and had everything to do with keeping me and anyone else who might threaten those place settings away from that room and his last memories of his beloved wife. He would never say as much, but I knew it to be true and my heart ached for him and his desire not to burden me with his loss.

  “Ma.” I stepped in my ma’s direction, my voice cutting through the quiet of the night because I wanted to distract her from my da’s makeshift memorial.

  “For fuck’s sake, Juma, give me a second.” Ma turned my way and huffed, not at all amused.

  “Ma!” I shot back, shocked by her words and her tone and her everything, and for several long seconds she and I stood in silence as the warm wet hot Georgia night folded us into its arms and pulled us close to its bosom, lovingly embracing us in all its thick heavy heat.

  “Oh sweet Jesus,” she finally whispered as her eyes filled. “I’m sorry, sweetness.” She pulled me into her arms and held me tight, her tiny body miraculously able to enfold mine as only a mother’s could. “My mouth is spitting out all the stress banging around in my brain.”

  “It’s okay, Ma,” I whispered and returned her embrace, wishing I could alleviate her worries, swallow them whole and render them immaterial, but I knew such desires were mere whimsy and the truth of it was Mimi Landry was worried and she had every reason to be. For crossing back to life was no small undertaking, neither for the dead nor the living.

  My team spent the last few weeks warning her of all the ways this could go horribly wrong, wrinkles in the process, our own imperfections, and she digested them all with clear eyes and a determined soul. Mimi knew we did all we could, crossed all the T’s and dotted all the I’s we were allowed, but we could only do so much. That a small part of this process was left to chance and luck and fate, and that small uncontrollable part was also the part that inspired fear and worry and stress. It was where any Deader’s hesitation lived. It was the space between death and reclamation. Mimi Landry had both feet firmly planted in that space right now.

  “I know, sweetness. I know it’ll be okay. Trust me, I know,” she whispered into my hair then released me with a soft smile and I was flooded with love for her and her fierce belief in me.

  I glanced into the window once more and took in the details of the space my da had carved for himself in Ma’s absence. Over the months of preparing for her reclamation, I’d noted that he moved the spare k
ey and smoked a little weed every night and ran five miles every morning and planted tulips instead of daffodils and ate bologna and butter on white bread and took thirty-minute hot showers and adopted a lop-eared dog named Carl and reverted to wearing his Levi’s to make rounds all because Mimi wasn’t there to tell him otherwise. And I wondered if that felt like freedom or whether he ignored it altogether because thinking on the alternative saddened his already broken heart.

  “I cannot go inside with you, Ma.” I cupped her face in my hands and made her look me in the eye.

  She smiled and kissed me.

  “I know this, too, sweetness. And frankly, I don’t want you to.” She released me and moved toward the front door. “That man in there is all mine and he and I have some things that need attending to, and we most certainly don’t need our child getting all up in the middle of it, messing with our groove.”

  And here she stood tall and winked and where before she was somewhat sad and scared, now she was all sex and mischief and I knew exactly why and how Rufus Landry fell for Mimi Gideon all those years ago in that club along the bayou.

  I stood at the window and watched as she entered their house like any other night. I heard her call out to him—Baby! I’m home—and then a few beats of silence. And because they were my ma and da and not any old Deaders assigned me from Marina’s log of assignments, I panicked and lost myself for a few seconds in all of that crazy quiet. Then he walked into my line of vision with a smile on his face, that same smile he wore any time she entered a room no matter how long she had been gone or they had been apart, that smile that spoke of all kinds of never-ending loves and forever evers and I breathed deeply and watched them wrap around each other and kiss a kiss made up of all kinds of time and I sunk into myself and wept.

  Then without warning my reality shifted and everything went ice cold.

  27: JUMA

  “Isn’t that sweet.”

  By the time I realized I wasn’t alone, it was already too late.

  A woman.

  Standing somewhere close enough that she didn’t need to raise her accented voice to be heard above the symphony of frogs and crickets and other creatures of the warm Georgia night. And even though I didn’t know for certain who she was, I had my suspicions and the clipped accent only added to my dread.