Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  Paz stared in shock at the stranger’s face. Then the lights went out, the streetlamps first and then the lights of the cars. Paz heard Dickson shout, and the sound of car doors opening as the SWATs leaped out. They had flashlights on their weapons and these snapped on, cutting white beams through the blackness. That was wrong, was Paz’s initial thought. It shouldn’t be that dark. The city was never that dark, not even when the power went out in a hurricane, there was always some light source, bouncing against the cloud cover. Even in the middle of the Glades it never got this dark. It only got this dark in a cave. Then the shooting started, automatic fire from the SWATs, lighting the darkness. Paz couldn’t see anything to shoot at. A bullet cracked by his head. He dropped and rolled under the car. He heard men scream, the tinkle of brass falling from the machine guns, the thud of bodies hitting the pavement. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. He listened to his own breathing and the pump of his own heart for a while.

  He opened his eyes and took his hands away from his ears. There was dim light, going red blue red. He rolled out from under the car. The streetlights were on again, and so were the top lights of the SWAT vans. Someone groaned, and he heard sirens a long way off. There were ten or so bodies lying on the street, mostly cops, but it looked like they had shot several ordinary pedestrians too. An elderly lady lay across a curb in a blood pool, her rucked-up flowered dress lifted by a faint breeze, a teenage kid was lying nearby, cut nearly in half by a burst of automatic fire. Cletis Barlow was nowhere in sight.

  Paz looked at his car. The side window was blown out, the front end bore the marks of a burst. Coolant ran in a thick stream down the gutter. Paz started to run. It was about five miles to Jane’s. He figured it would take a little over an hour if he didn’t stop running at all.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Finnegan is nice enough, for a lawyer. He tells me he’s a partner in Bailey, Lassiter & Phelps, the family’s firm in New York, and he just happened to be taking a meeting in Atlanta when Josey yanked the handle. Being nearest partner to big client, he got tagged and came. I lie back in the leather of his rented Town Car and breathe in air-conditioning; I’m back in the bubble wrap of Doe existence, and I find I am a little sorry, as I never quite fit into it. I’m also nervous, because it means I’ll have to talk to my father again.

  Finnegan is giving me lawyerly advice, which I interrupt to tell him about Luz. I give him the whole story straight-up. He purses his lips. He is thin lipped, and it distorts the whole bottom shelf of his face to generate a purse equal to my little problem.

  “You say this officer, this detective …”

  “Detective Paz.”

  “Paz. He knows the whole story?”

  “Not the part about the mother’s death, no. But he knows something is fishy about Luz. And if he looks hard, he’ll find out who she is.”

  “Yes, but there’s no evidence you had anything to do with the woman’s um … accident. She fell and struck her head. You found the girl, patently abused, and took her home, gave her shelter, cared for her. Irregular, of course; you should have notified the authorities, but … we can play it as a Good Samaritan excess. She calls you ‘Mommy,’ does she?”

  “Muffa.”

  “Hm. Let me get to work on it. I’ll call the governor’s office, see what can be done. Clearly, you’re the best possible adoptive mother with respect to resources for a child; you’re married, which is to the good. Is there any chance … ?”

  He sees my look.

  “Sorry, no, of course not. Still, I think we can get you named guardian while we iron out the details.”

  Iron on, Finnegan! It’s so easy to love lawyers when one is rich. We drive to the transmission place and I get my clunker, occasioning another massive lip-purse. I shake hands with Finnegan, thank him. He unloads a last smidgen of advice, to keep my mouth shut and avoid associating with my husband. Poor man, he was all set for a task like bailing a rich bitch out of some DUI-like situation and he ends up with me, voodoo, mass murder, Armageddon, and the Last Days. He hands me a bulky manila envelope and bids me good night.

  After the chilled car the night is like a warm washrag against my face. Driving home, I’m aware of the sound of sirens, more sirens than usual, even down here in the poor end of the Grove. I hear a flat explosion, too, somewhere to the north, and closer, the firecracker poppings of small-arms fire. I park and hurry across to Dawn’s.

  She’s pale and nervous and she chatters a mile a minute: Jeopardy has been interrupted by the news. The Last Days indeed! Some huge and disparate disaster is occurring. An oil truck has crashed on I-95, gunfights have broken out near the Miami River, a riot is brewing in Overtown, a whole family has leaped from the top of a Brickell apartment house, a squadron of cops has run amok with automatic weapons and shot one another and several civilians. What’s happening, is everyone going crazy? What should she do? Her husband is away again. What should she do?

  I suggest a soothing cup of herbal tea, which I make, in her messy kitchen. This served, I greet my child with more fervor than I usually show. She feigns indifference, and continues her play with little Eleanor. Dawn and I sit in wicker chairs and watch the TV for a while. The pundits have decided that it is sabotage and a cult riot, although no one is sure about which cult is involved. Then the screen fizzles and goes dark. We wait, and watch the signature static of the Big Bang for a while, before I thumb the thing off. Dawn gets weepy and I comfort her as best I can.

  Around eight, I take Luz home. I have a lot of stuff to do tonight. She’s clinging and fretful, however, and I must stay with her, up in her little garret room, until she’s asleep. Downstairs again, I take another amphetamine, no, two, just to make sure I stay up on the plateau, where there is a good view. I can’t fall into the crevasse now, uh-uh.

  I haul out the box and remove my divining bag, and some bags and bottles and soiled envelopes containing various organic flakes and fragments? komo?and the jar of kadoul I mixed up the other day, and my Mauser. I arrange these all on the kitchen table. Before starting, I look into the manila envelope that lawyer Finnegan gave me. Inside is my passport, my checkbook, my VISA and Amex cards, my New York driver’s licence, and a minute cellular phone, with a note taped to it, in Josey’s felt-tipped scrawl: Janey?call Dad! auto #1 love J . Oh Josey! How long would you have kept the dead girl’s things had I really done it?

  So the crying starts again, and through tears I seek and push the right buttons. The tiny thing reaches out into the wireless nexus and gets my father. By then, of course, I am honking like a walrus in heat, and I say how sorry I am, and he tells me not to think about it, that he never believed that I was dead. I asked him why not, as I thought I had done a pretty good job. He said he knew that if I really wanted to kill myself I would have used a gun. He said he knew I didn’t have anything to do with Mary’s death, and that he knew I really loved her, even though she didn’t love me. I was amazed: we’re always so surprised when our parents can figure us out, we all think we’re so secret and clever. He asked when I was coming home. I said I had some things to take care of here, but not long at all. Then we talked about my mom for a while.

  He asked me if he could help. I knew what he meant, and I said, no, he couldn’t. I was going to a place where even the red handle wouldn’t help, and Josey couldn’t track me down for another rescue. He told me to take care and trust in God.

  After we hung up, I finished my hysterics, weeping for my family, for Mary, and my poor gorgeous crazy mom, and Dad of course, but I’d always been able to cry for him. Then I washed my face in the tepid water of the kitchen sink and got down to work.

  It is strangely the case that a particular arrangement and combination of organic materials, which have been handled in a ritual way, will perform acts definable as magic, or prevent them within a particular area. You can make, for example, a ch’akadoulen and plant it in front of a guy’s house, and he will gradually fade away and die. Or suddenly decide to kill his family and hav
e to be shot. Whether or not he’s a believer. So I carefully compound my scant store of komo into tetechinté, countermagic. I only have enough komo for five of them. They don’t look like much: little bundles of bark and leaves, smeared with oily substances, strong-smelling, each wrapped in an intricate web of red, black, white, and yellow threads.

  I go outside and bury one at each corner of my house. There is a smell of distant burning, nastily hydrocarbonish, and a red glow to the north, and low heavy clouds, no breath of wind, although the clouds seem to be writhing along, lit from below. They must have tried to take him, and now he’s showing them what he can do if he likes. He doesn’t understand that they will all die before admitting that what he is is real, that they will squat, if it should come to that, in the glowing ruins of their cities and say, coincidence, random, bad luck, natural disaster, unknown terrorists, mass hallucinations, like a mantra. And he will still be invisible, the poor man.

  The last little bundle I take up to the loft and hang from the ceiling above Luz’s head. Over my own neck I draw the amulet Uluné gave me when I left Danolo, a little red-dyed leather pouch, into which I have never peered.

  Now I clean my Mauser 96, a restful chore. It has no screws in its mechanism at all. Each part pops free with a precisely directed pressure and snaps in with a satisfying click, just where it belongs; the smell of the oil rag reminds me of home, of Dad. After that, I take the rounds out of the box magazine and rub the bullets with a substance designed by Olo technicians to make them penetrate magical objects or beings. Then I reload.

  I need a bath, now, to clean the jail stink off my skin, a long hot one in a huge bathtub like they have at Sionnet, but what I have instead is my little chipped one. I stay in it a long time, and wash the last of poor Dolores’s shit-brown out of my hair. After I emerge, I rub the haze from the mirror and contemplate Jane recidivus, trying not to recall the undying ghosts of this same assessing gaze, from my youth, when I cried, and cursed my plain face, and hated my sister, whom the mirror loved. I see the perfect teeth of the rich, quite startling eyes, if I do say so, nose too big, jaw too strong, teeny tiny little skinny lips like worms … At any rate, a lot better looking than Dolores. I get out my barber scissors, spread newspaper, and snip away, snip away, until I have made a rough dark-yellow helmet, jaw length on the sides and back, with a center parting, the somewhat jockish look I had in sophomore year, when I played a lot of field hockey. My husband always liked me to wear it long, and I did, down to the waist in back, braided and pinned up, a pain in the ass in Africa, but the Africans loved it. They used to touch it on the street, like touching a snake, for luck. I carefully gather up all the cut hair, down to the tiniest fragment I can find, and flush it away in the toilet. A little habit in the sorcery biz, practically the first thing Uluné taught me.

  I don my ratty blue chenille Goodwill bathrobe and sit in the kitchen in the dark with my gun. The air is stifling, loaded heavy with the usual Miami perfume: jasmine, rot, car exhaust, a rumor of salt water, plus tonight the stink of burned things and … just now, the dulfana, and a dead rat odor. At the screen door I look down in the yard. There are three of them, standing motionless in a group. Paarolawatset . I can’t see their features, but one of them has the sagging shape of the man Paz called Swett.

  He doesn’t want me wandering away again, it appears, and has dispatched watch-things to trail me, or maybe he fears for my safety in the chaos he’s causing, and these are guards. That would be like Witt, to think of that.

  I sit down and drink water. The thought of food is nearly as nauseating to me as the thought of sleep. I hear thumps and scratching sounds outside, calls of animals and birds whose natural habitat is not South Florida. I get my journals from the box and review my notes, as for a big test. I should be more or less safe from ordinary jinja, his sendings, because Uluné was a major power and he gave me some good stuff. I wish he were here now, Uluné. He wouldn’t actually protect me. He sure didn’t when I was witched out of my hut by Witt and Durakné Den. But I always got the feeling that Uluné was playing a much larger game than the usual sorcerers’ spats, that if he thought it was required, he could have crushed both Witt and his witch teacher like cockroaches. Let Ifa unfold, Jeanne, he would say. Don’t grab at the folds like a greedy child tearing the peel from a fruit. The do-nothing phase of life, as sensei used to put it, so hard for us Americans.

  So I wait, and after a while … an hour? A couple of hours? … there is another unfolding. I hear steps on the shell gravel of the drive, and steps on my stairs. I work the action on the Mauser, chambering a magic bullet, and point at the screen door. There is a shadow there, a face. It’s him, Witt. I take aim, not at all confident in my ability to shoot, not even now. Or that the bullet will have any effect.

  “Jane? Ms. Doe? Are you there?”

  I let out the breath I am holding, and a wave of relief passes through my body, tingling down to my fingers. I lower the gun, and I say, “Come in, Detective Paz. The door’s open.”

  He comes in. I turn on the kitchen light. A little double take when he sees the new me. When he notices the pistol he frowns.

  “That’s quite a piece.”

  “It is. It’s a Mauser 96, old and very rare. It works, though. You look like you’ve had a rough night.”

  He has a smudge on his forehead, grease or smoke, and the knees of his tan slacks are grimy.

  “You could say that. Can I sit down?” I motion to the other chair and he falls into it heavily. He gestures to my pistol. “Expecting somebody? Or considering another suicide?”

  “Troubling times,” I say. “You never can tell who might come by on a night like this. Or what.” This sounds so portentously like the dialogue in a bad horror film that I feel hysteria rising in my throat, and I have to stifle a giggle.

  “How do you know I’m not a what?”

  “If you were a sending, you couldn’t have gotten in. I have bars up against magical forces. The pistol is for physical beings, like those zombies out in the yard.” He stares at me, his mouth slightly open, like a child’s. A good deal of the slick gloss and confidence he exhibited earlier today seems to have been scraped off Detective Paz by this night’s doings. I feel for him. I recall being scraped myself.

  He says, “Shit! This is really happening, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” I say.

  He hisses something in Spanish that I don’t quite catch, and strikes the heel of his hand hard against his temple. “Fuck! Sorry, I’ve had a bad day.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Lately? Well, we started the evening by arresting your husband. That didn’t work out too good. He didn’t stay arrested. He was in the back of my car, cuffed, and then he was smoke. Then all hell broke loose, which I thought was a figure of speech until a while ago. You wouldn’t have any idea about how he does all this shit?”

  “Actually, I have a very good idea, but I already told you and you didn’t pay any attention. I don’t really feel like going through it again.” I tapped the cover of the journal. “It’s all in here, more or less. You could read it.”

  “I might do that.” He looks around my bare kitchen. “You wouldn’t have a drink handy, would you?”

  “A drink drink? No, I don’t. But I could run across to Polly’s and borrow a couple of beers.” I rise, pistol in hand. I should have offered, of course; we Does are trained in the elementary courtesies, but there has been a long time between guests chez Jane.

  “What about … ?” With a movement of his head he indicates the waiting things in the yard.

  “Oh, they won’t bother me. If they do, I’ll shoot them.”

  “The zombies? I thought they were dead already.”

  “A popular misconception. In any case, I have magical bullets. Stay where you are. Don’t move. I mean really don’t move. You’ll be fine.”

  I go down the stairs and cross the yard. The paarolawatset begin to move toward me, but slowly, shuffling like old bums.


  I knock on Polly’s side door. The yellow porch light comes on, a curtain pulls aside, showing the terrified face of my landlady. At first she doesn’t recognize me; then, with a look of vast relief, she does. Several locks click and she pulls me inside.

  “Dolores! Thank God! What’s going on? I was watching TV and then the cable went down. There’s supposed to be a riot going on. Christ! Is that a gun? Who are those guys in the yard? I called the cops, but 911 is jammed up …”

  I put a calming hand on her shoulder. “There’s not going to be a riot around here. Just stay in the house and you’ll be okay. Are the kids in?”

  “In L.A. with their father, thank God. They’re due back tomorrow. Dolores, what’s going on?”

  I try to radiate confidence. Polly is actually pretty tough, and New Agey enough not to be knocked entirely out of whack by weird doings. “It’s a real long story, but first of all, I’m not Dolores anymore, I’m Jane. My husband isn’t dead, like I told you; he’s alive, and after me, and he’s a … sort of a terrorist, and those are his people out there, watching me.”

  “You’re kidding, right? God, you cut and colored your hair! You look great. But seriously, you were hiding from him and he found you? Did you call the cops?”

  “Yes. One of them is up in my place and I offered him a beer that I don’t have. I came over to borrow a couple.”

  She bursts out laughing, and I join her, and arm in arm we go up to the kitchen and she passes me a six-pack of Miller tallboys from the fridge. She says, “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna go up to bed and turn up the A/C all the way, and put Hildegard von Bingen on the headphones and pull the covers up over my head until this is over.”

  I tell her this sounds like a good plan. I am halfway home when I feel a finger scratching at my neck, and then my neck hairs are pulled and twisted in that annoying way she used to do when we were kids, and my sister’s voice comes clearly over my left shoulder. Oh, Janey, you really messed up again, big-time. This is all your fault. Plain Jane. Plain Jane couldn’t stand I was pregnant, you were so jealous you could hardly look at me, you always hated me, Mom said so. That’s why you got him to kill me. You knew he was going to kill me, didn’t you? And my baby. Look at me, Jane! Look what you did to me!