by Unknown
That evening, Paz gave a long interview to Doris Taylor as he had promised, telling the whole invented story, and casting Jane Doe as a hapless victim, not worth an interview, a very dull bird. Doris bought it and went away happy. Then they ate again from the institutional-quantity load of chicken, rice, and beans that Mrs. Paz had brought, and Paz drank a couple of Coronas while Jane put Luz to bed upstairs. When she came down again, as she walked by the sling chair where he sat, he reached out and pulled her down onto his lap, and kissed her. She kissed him back, then pulled away. “Um, Paz? There’s some stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Yeah, stop that or I won’t be able to.” She sat up on his lap. “About my sister.”
“If you were an accessory, I don’t want to hear it.”
Her face stiffened. “What do you know?”
“Nothing for sure. But you didn’t blow the whistle on him. I mean afterward. The house is full of guns and you didn’t even try to shoot him. I mean, could he read your mind?”
“Not as such. But he knows me pretty well. Better than I thought. It was like Barlow. There was something in me, from way back, a grel, we might as well say. Insane jealousy. That’s the real dirty secret. I should have told you out on the boat. You have no idea what it was like growing up with her in the house. I mean as a little kid. Nobody ever looked at me. Invisible, like him. Our sick bond, and didn’t he make me pay for it? Except my dad saw me, sometimes, when I was a boy for him.
“Oh, shit, Paz!” She pressed her face into his shoulder. “I saw him,” she said into his shirt. “That afternoon. I knew he wasn’t at the car show with them. He walked right past me and waved and smiled, and I knew what he was going to do. I just sat there. And part of me was glad. Not seeing people is the worst thing you can do.”
“He witched you.”
“No,” she said. “He didn’t have to. God forgive me. And I didn’t have the guts to really kill myself. I just pretended to be Dolores Touey, a woman whose sandals I am unworthy to tie.” She cried for what seemed like a long time, heaving against him, making odd, dry croaking sounds. Then, without a significant transition, she began to kiss him again, and after a mouth-bruising clutch of minutes, she pulled away. Sparks seemed to be flying from her eyes.
“I had to tell you that,” she said, “and also I have to tell you that while I am unbelievably hot for you, we are not going to jump into bed right now.”
“No?”
“No. I was serious about being still a little stuck in the unseen world. It wouldn’t be healthy for either of us. Real sorcerers are usually chaste.”
“Uh-huh. And when do you think you’ll get unstuck?”
“When I’m home in Sionnet, after having escaped by water. The prophecy.”
“But the thing’s over. Dingdong the witch is dead.”
“Oh, right, so now we can just forget what happened? You’ve seen Ifa. Do you think he’s someone you want to fuck around with?” He had nothing to say to that. An involuntary shudder ran up his spine. She rose from his lap, grabbed a straight chair, and straddled it.
“A little distance, I think,” she said. “Look, you’re feeling sexual, right? Attracted to me?”
“Majorly.”
“Right, and I’m attracted to you. You’re exactly my type, as you probably figured out already. You don’t have his brilliance, but you’re more solid. You love your mother and she loves you. You really are un hombre sincero de donde crecen la palma . There isn’t a big fat hole in you for the grelet to crawl into. Besides that, I’m unbelievably horny. The escape from danger, and it’s been years for me …” She laughed. “Always a deadly combo. I’m throwing out gallons of pheromones and so are you. If we’re not careful, we’ll have a romance.”
“This would be bad?”
“Well, yeah. Do you want to spend more time in drugged hallucination? I don’t.”
Paz didn’t like the way the conversation was going. “What do you want, then?” he asked.
“I want to take Luz back to my family and glue her into it. I want to ask forgiveness from them, and forgive them, too. I might be able to help my mom, and even if not, I can be there for her as a person, not a cranky child. She doesn’t love me, but I can love her. I want to sail around the Sound with Josey and teach Luz the water. That seems like enough for starters. Later, I’ll take up my work again. I need to get back in touch with Marcel Vierchau, too, speaking of forgiveness. You know, I saw him once a couple of years ago in the Atlanta airport. I spotted him coming down the corridor and I ducked into the ladies’ so I wouldn’t have to confront him. The point is, I want to live actual life now, not hallucination, so …”
“I get it.” He stood up. “Well, I guess I’ll be going then.”
“Oh, sit down! We just defeated the powers of darkness together and now you’re ditching me because I won’t fuck you?”
Surprising himself, he sat down again. She said, “You want some advice?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure. If your life is perfect you don’t need any advice. That’s a Yoruba saying.”
He thought about that for a while. “All right. What is it?” Grumpily.
“Do the same as me. Stop acting like a baby with your mom. See her. Love her for what she is. And your father, too.”
“What? That bastard?”
“He’s still your father, and you’re not a little kid anymore. You’re a big, strong cop. A heroic cop. You’ve been on TV, on national TV. Your pal Doris is going to write a bestselling completely fallacious but plausible book about this whole thing, and you’re going to be the star of it. There’ll be a movie. The Cuban community’s going to be falling all over themselves to thank the guy who caught the fiend who killed Teresa Vargas. Don’t you think the whole thing about your dad is going to come out?”
Paz had not considered this. He felt fear sweat prickle on his forehead. She went on: “You have to look him in the eye and forgive him. If he rejects you then, it’s on him, you don’t have to drag his shit around for the rest of your life. You’ve got a couple of half siblings, too. And a stepmother. They might have something to say about it.”
“Thanks for the advice,” he said neutrally. She held his eye for a long time, waiting, it seemed, for something that did not occur, and then closed her eyes.
“You’re welcome.” She stood up and yawned. “Look, Paz. I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours in over four days. I’m going to sleep until Luz wakes me up tomorrow. We’ll talk then. Good night.”
With that she walked into her bedroom and shut the door.
Paz drove slowly through the city, to his apartment, showered, and got into bed. For a while he listened to grel thoughts: crazy bitch, white girl, couldn’t possibly understand, never going to do that shit, need to find some other women, need to move out of this place, quit the restaurant, what am I supposed to do, go see Yoiyo, what crap, he’d spit in my face … and then fell into an unprofitably dreamless sleep.
In the morning, there were TV crews outside his house, wanting interviews and film. He brushed past them and drove to the Grove, to the garage on Hibiscus Street, thinking about not going anywhere, about becoming the turtle-faced cop, sixty and all alone, getting blow jobs from teen whores under the crime lights and never a woman to love him like Jane Doe had loved her demon husband. He thought about what Jane had said the night before. For a moment a different path opened up in his mind, a path that led to being a different kind of person. It didn’t last long. He thought he might try to open it again, though.
He found Jane’s apartment empty, stripped of everything but a few trash bags with Goodwill written on a note pinned to one of them. Paz felt a vast relief, mixed with … no, he was not going to go there today. What he’d do now, he thought, was take a week or so of leave, avoid the newsies, maybe fly over to Bimini for a couple of days, meet someone, maybe a girl in a string bikini, a regular person with no cosmic powers who didn’t know him at all and didn’t care �
�
“Hey, Paz.”
He went out on the landing. She was there, with Luz, saying good-bye to her neighbors, a large, hippie-looking woman with two mulatto kids and the pregnant woman, Dawn, with her toddler in tow. They seemed genuinely sad to see her go, actual tears. She walked halfway up the stairs.
“Well, Paz, how’s reality?” she asked cheerfully. “Thought any about what I said?”
“Reality is holding,” he said, ignoring the rest. “I came to see you off.” He handed her a bottle of champagne.
“Thank you. Must I break it over the hull?”
“Whatever.”
“Then I think I’ll drink it tonight. Will you do me a favor?”
“Anything.” A hint of suspicion in his tone.
“Drive us down to the dock and help me get loaded, and then take the Buick and give it to some deserving poor.”
“No problem,” he said happily.
They drove to Dinner Key then, and Paz got one of the little marina carts and unloaded their small baggage and helped them wheel it down to where the yacht was anchored. He waited on the dock with Luz while Jane stowed their gear and did various mysterious things around the vessel. Jane came back on deck from the cabin. Paz handed the child over to her. Jane had donned an orange life jacket, and now she strapped a miniature version onto Luz.
Under the jacket Jane was wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki Bermudas. She had Top-Sider boat shoes and a pair of fancy sunglasses on, they looked like Vuarnets, Paz thought, extremely cool, and she looked terrific. Bye-bye, Jane. Sad, but also a little relieved.
She said, “I can’t really handle this rig under sail myself so I’ll stop up the Waterway and pick up an itinerant sailing freak for crew, or else I’m going to have to putt along inland up to New York. What I really want to do is run out Government Cut from here and head for blue water and feel a live deck under my toes again.” She stepped up onto the dock and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she dropped onto the boat again, down below this time, and he heard the heavy cranking of a diesel and then the sough-sough of a sweetly tuned engine idling, and smelled the acrid smoke of the exhaust. She untied the stern line and brought it aboard, coiling it neatly with an obviously practiced motion.
“Paz, if you would be so kind,” she said from the wheel, gesturing at the line forward. He untied it, coiled it roughly, tossed it on deck. The boat drifted slowly away from the dock. He saw green water, darkly shadowed. A few inches, a foot, widening. He looked at her, at her wheel, the light shining in her hair. Two feet; she was drifting away. He felt suddenly an enormous urge to leap the gap, to abandon his life, to spend the rest of it with her. She tipped her glasses up onto her head, so he could see her eyes, green as the water. She knew what he was thinking, he thought. The feeling passed, leaving a hollow sadness.
Three feet, then ten. She turned the wheel. The bow swung away from the dock. Last look; he couldn’t quite read the expression on her face, whether it was joy or something else. In any case, she blew him a kiss, and he watched Jane Doe escape by water.
GLOSSARY
OLO
alujonnu?an evil spirit
ama?head
arun?spirit world
ashe?spiritual energy
babandolé?sorcerer
b’fan?god
bfunai?personal soul
bon?house
bonch’dolé?sorcerer’s house
ch’akadoulen?a magical object
ch’andouli?sorcery power
chinté?spell
danolo?where the Olo dwell
debentchouajé?harmonious connection
dez?gold
dik?not Olo
dontzeh?sefuné-less child; witch
dulfana?aura of witchcraft
faila’olo?invisibility
fana?the magical body
gd?female
gdezdikamai?goldenheaded foreigner married not quite a female (Jane’s name)
gdola?woman
gdsefuné?soul-mother
grel (pl. grelet)?demon(s) of the mind
ila?fate, line, fishline
ilegbo?to enter trance
ilegm’bet?primary trance state
ilidoni?lit. “shameful march,” the Olo migration
imai?child
imasefuné?soul-child
im’otunas?thought
jiladoul?sorcerers’ war
jinja?sending, sorcerous animal
kadoul?sorcerous compound
komo?bark and leaves used in Olo sorcery
m’doli?the unseen world, the domain of sorcery
m’fa?pedestal, creation, the world
m’fon?the physical body
ndol?sorcery
okunikua?fourfold sacrifice
olawa?man
olo?real people
or’ashnet?god-touched
otunas?the intellect, mind
owa?male classifier
owabandolets?sorcery teacher
owadeb?”father” honorific
owasefuné?soul-father
paarolawats?lit. “destroyed person,” a zombie
sefuné?affective soul
t’chona?river wight
te?negative suffix
tembé?world soul
tetechinté?countersorcery
vono ba-sefuné?merging of souls
weidouliné?magical ally
zandoul?a container for magical objects
CHENKA
Aluesfan?non-Chenka woman
dala?demonic sex
fentienskin?shamaness
ketzi?animal prison for bad spirit
ogga?psychic being in mind
rishen, rishot?demons
teniesgu?women’s magic
Afterwords
In a sense, this book began with me being bitten by an octopus in a Bimini lagoon. I had stalked the wily creature to its lair in the coral, and had squirted ammonia into the hole to force it out, when all at once it emerged in a rush, and instead of blowing ink and trying to flee, like any normal octopus, it swarmed up my arm and bit me. Octopuses are venomous, but at the time no one was really sure how toxic their bite was, because so few people had been bitten by one. The reason I was in Bimini, in a boat, with my arm starting to look like a blackish zucchini, instead of sitting in an editorial office in New York, remains even now somewhat obscure. Somewhere in my twenty-third year, after having always been an English major-type and writer, I succumbed to a brainstorm and decided to go back to school, get a B.S. and then become a marine biologist. Who knows why we do these things? A little Captain Cousteau, a little Rachel Carson, the desire not to do the expected, the notion of being able to earn a living dressed in a bathing suit instead of tweeds…
In any case, in a few years I found myself working for a doctorate at the University of Miami’s celebrated marine laboratory, where I soon discovered that marine biology did not consist exclusively, or even mainly, of floating blithely among picturesque coral reefs or contemplating the mysteries of the deep. Much of the field, and the main emphasis of the professors thereof, involved collecting creatures, classifying them, pickling them in formalin, and snipping them up under the microscope, or else taking enormous numbers of precise measurements in an effort to find out why a particular limpet chose a particular rock. I was not good at these things. What I really wanted to do was to laze around in that bathing suit and watch animals. Luckily, it turned out that there was a sub-area of biology devoted to doing just that, or nearly; it was called ethology, and that was where I chose to do my dissertation. The animal I chose to do it on was the octopus.
Now, the ethologist’s main task is to understand the perceptual world of the animal and that requires a tricky kind of concentration, especially with a creature like the octopus, which is basically a snail that’s as smart as a cat, and from the human perspective the most alien intelligence on the planet. You don’t really get this from the data, as in conventional science: it comes to you through long experience, and then you can construc
t an experimental regime that will allow non-bathing-suited scientists to share what you’ve learned. Thus Bimini, thus the boat and the bite.
When I arrived at the little marine station, the station director was standing on the dock with a lovely blonde woman wearing a robe and a bikini. This was how I happened to meet J. I said, “I’ve been bitten by an octopus,” which turned out to be the sort of introductory line she appreciated. We spent the rest of the day together, during which I discovered that a lot of St. Pauli Girl beer was what the doctor ordered for octopus bites, and also that she was an anthropologist, was working at a big public hospital in Miami, and had recently returned from a trip from Algeria to Nigeria by car in company with a well-known black writer. This person had apparently gone nuts, seized upon J. as a symbol of white oppression, and arranged for a local sorcerer to curse her. She subsequently became gravely ill, and had to be yanked from death’s embrace by her family.
I had not previously met anyone who’d been ensorcelled, so I was fascinated ? never mind that I was spending my days deep within the scientific paradigm, in which such things were not allowed. We became close friends in Miami during the time I was finishing my degree, and when someone broke into her house and assaulted her, she asked me to move in as a sort of bodyguard. J.’s job at the hospital was working with people who’d been afflicted by sorcery, not normally a Medicare-covered treatment modality, but fairly common in Miami at the time. I hung around the fringes of the santería-voudoun world with her and observed a number of phenomena not easily explained by science. By this time it was clear that I was not about to set the world of biology aflame ? not many people were interested in octopus behavior ? and so after the university grudgingly gave me a doctorate I departed for a job as a restaurant cook.
Shortly thereafter, J. and I got married, although not to each other, and I started working for the county manager as a criminal justice analyst. I got to know a little about cop work and battered kids, and a lot about the peculiar ethnic politics of the Magic City. Then I went to Washington and spent twenty years as a government drone, while moonlighting as a ghostwriter ? political speeches and a line of thrillers.
