by Cave, Hugh
"What?"
"His real name is Fenelon," Sam said grimly, "and I knew him all too well in Jacmel before he lost his legs. He hates my guts with a passion."
30
Kay Gilbert was leaning from a chair and reaching to the floor for her sneakers, when she saw them turn in at the gate. She had just come in from the backyard after bathing. In this house the water for drinking and cooking was carried from the village spring, but that for other uses fell from heaven. Bamboo gutters caught rain from the zinc roof and conducted it into a pair of old oil drums.
It must have been a job to lug those two heavy drums to this remote place, she had thought while standing naked in the yard, washing herself.
The sneakers on, she called to Tina in another room, "Hey, baby, your father's home!" then walked out to greet the arrivals. Only three of them, she noticed. No Dr. Bell. "You didn't find your father?" she asked, holding Mildred's mule while the woman dismounted.
The daughter of Dr. Bell shook her head. Sam and Metellus dismounted, too, and Metellus nodded to Tina, who had followed Kay from the house. Peering at the door, the Haitian said in a tone of annoyance, "Where's your mother? Can't she even come with some water for us?"
Kay looked at him, hesitated, and decided there was no way she could avoid telling him. "Fifine and the children have gone to her sister's, Metellus."
"What?"
"I'm sorry. She asked me to tell you she won't be coming back while Tina is here."
As he stripped the mules, dropping their gear on the ground, Metellus looked more frustrated and bewildered than angry. He kept glancing at his daughter and shaking his head. "You'd better come with me," he said to her as he led the mules away.
Tina trotted along at his side. Kay, Mildred, and Sam watched in silence until they disappeared behind the house.
"What happened at Legrun?" Kay asked then.
Sam told her some of it. Now was not the time, he decided, to discuss Margal's past.
"Well, at least you know there's nothing wrong," she said. "Dr. Bell must be back in the capital somewhere, no? Or maybe off in some other part of the country, trying to interview other Margal types. I found you a place to sleep."
Looking more than just physically tired, Mildred said, "Thank you. Is it far?"
"Just down the road. Supper will be ready for us when we show up. You two must want a bath first."
"God, yes," Mildred said with a forced laugh.
"It's an open-air bathroom. I'll show you." Touching. her on the arm, Kay indicated the pile of gear on the ground. "You'll need a change of clothes, won't you?"
"What? Oh, yes . . ." Wearily, Mildred sank to her knees to fumble in a saddlebag.
Kay watched her with compassion. They had a nearly exhausted woman on their hands, she decided. One who needed not only a bath, but food and rest. Lots of rest. You had to admire her, though, for attempting a journey like this on her first visit to the Caribbean's most primitive country.
Finding what she wanted, Mildred struggled to her feet. Kay led her around to the water drums. Returning, she found Sam in the house, sprawled on a chair in the front room.
"So you found us a hotel," he said.
"It wasn't easy, Buster."
"I'll bet. How long did it take you? The whole time we were gone?"
She nodded. "The house is small and nearby. I didn't think to ask there at first, and then someone suggested I try it because the woman lives alone." Moving to a chair from which she could really look at him, she seated herself. Sam Norman, louse, she thought. Sam Norman, drunken lout. Sam Norman . . . question mark. It had taken her a long time to find a house where he and his Mildred could spend the night. And an even longer time to locate someone willing to sell a pair of chickens. This remote village was not geared to accommodate strangers.
Of course, if she had known that Fifine and the children would be leaving, Sam and Mildred could probably have stayed right here. But it was too late now, and, besides, Fifine might return.
"You know," she said after a silence, "it's a little fantastic, our meeting again like this."
Sam thought about it and moved his head negatively. "Not really. You're here with the youngster because of Margal. He's almost certainly responsible for what happened to her. I'm here because Mildred's old man heard about him and came here to see him."
"Well. . ."
"The only real coincidence is that we arrived at the same time." Rising, he went to the open front door and looked out. "Now, where did Metellus get to? I want to ask him something."
"He's probably gone after his family."
Sam turned to frown at her. "They're convinced, are they? That the girl's a zombie?"
"Fifine is convinced. Without her, I don't think the children would be too big a problem. But it doesn't matter. The village won't accept Tina anyway."
Sam continued to frown. "Tell me something. Did strange things happen to you on your way here?"
"I'm not sure."
"What do you mean, you're not sure?"
"Well, certain things seemed to happen. I can't make up my mind if they were real or not. Why?"
Sam took the photograph from his pocket. "This is Margal. Do you know him?"
She studied it. Shook her head. "No, I don't think so. Should I?"
"You saw him once. The night I barged into your room in Jacmel. It's Fenelon."
"What?" She peered at the picture more closely.
"You wouldn't know, I guess. You only saw him at night under a street lamp. But I'm positive. My old friend, Fenelon. Maybe his real name is Margal. Maybe he came from here in the first place, and only returned here because he lost his legs. The important thing, it seems to me—"
"The important thing, Sam," she interrupted in a whisper, gazing fearfully at his face, "is that he hates you. Oh, my God, you've got to get out of here! Does he know you recognized him?"
"I'm not sure. I think so."
"It doesn't matter. He must have recognized you."
"Hell, I told him my name before I realized who he was."
"Oh, Sam—" She fell silent as Mildred, now wearing clean pants and shirt, stepped through the doorway with a wad of dripping clothes in her hands. Dr. Bell's daughter looked a lot better, Kay decided. Refreshed. Even relaxed. "You did your laundry, huh?"
"There was a wash pan out there and some soap, so I helped myself. But I can't find a clothesline."
"You don't hang; you drape. Here, let me." Rising, Kay took the wet clothes and stepped out the door, heading across the front yard toward the fence.
With a nod to Mildred, Sam pushed himself up and went to wash off the day's grime.
The house down the road was smaller than Tina's home, with a sitting room scarcely large enough to accommodate the three of them for supper. Before serving the meal, its owner, a tiny, solemn-faced woman named Resia, showed Sam and Mildred the bedrooms they would use. Each was barely big enough to hold its cot-size wooden bed. She herself would use the front room, she said.
"She'll sleep on the floor?" Mildred asked, ill at ease. Sam relayed the query in Creole.
"My child, until I was your age, I never slept anywhere else but on a floor."
Her man was dead, Resia explained. Had chopped his foot with a machete and let it become infected. He was a good man. They had seven children, all of them grown up and gone away now. Again, Sam translated.
Where, Mildred wondered, had seven children slept in a house this size?
Resia's cooking leaned heavily on hot peppers, but that did not reduce their appetites; it merely slowed their attack a little. And while the birds were lean and tough, even Mildred agreed they were tastier than the pampered ones sold in Stateside supermarkets.
The ache in his belly somewhat attended to, Sam slowed his rate of intake even more and gazed at Kay, seated opposite him. "You were going to tell me of certain things that happened on your way here. Let's get back to that, shall we?" Answering the question on Mildred's face, he added, "It's a thin
g we were working on while you took your bath."
''Oh."
"I didn't say things happened," Kay reminded him. "I said they seemed to happen."
"Okay. What seemed to happen?"
She told of the flash flood at the fording and how she had fallen from her mule. "The more I think about it, the more I feel it may have been all in my mind. Not the fall, of course. That was real. But I may have got scared and frightened the mule into throwing me."
Sam looked at Mildred, who made no comment.
"That night, my mind played tricks again," Kay continued, and told about the lizard. "I might blame my imagination for that, too, but Tina said she saw the same thing and was just as scared as I was. Then, the next day, at that shuddery place called Devil's Leap. . ."
She told of the midday darkness and the fire that was not a fire. Of how her guide, Joseph, had refused to go on afterward. "So on that occasion all three of us thought we saw the same thing, and I just don't know what to believe."
"Margal," Mildred said quietly.
"You think so?"
"I do."
"Putting thoughts into our heads?"
"If conditions are right. And we're the kind ofpeople he can do it to." Mildred told how she had slipped away from Sam at the Vallière post office and been compelled to go to the river. How she had tried again to go there in the middle of the night. "I know I'm susceptible to mental suggestion," she said, "because for years I've been able to talk to my father by mental telepathy. Nothing happened to Sam on this mission to Margal, you'll notice. Only to me."
"And to Oriol," Sam reminded her.
"Yes. Our guide. He was told to kill me."
Startled, Kay said, "He what?"
Mildred told of the guide's attempt to frighten her mule into plunging off the cliff trail. "Like me," she said to Kay, "you must be one of those Margal can influence. I'm not surprised he could sway Tina and our two guides. He knows them."
"He knows Sam, too," Kay pointed out.
"But evidently wasn't told Sam was coming."
They had finished eating while they were talking, and now the woman of the house came to take away their plates. They waited in silence until she departed. Then Mildred said, "Now can we get to the why ofit? Assuming we're right, and really into some kind of witchcraft here—for what reason is Margal doing these things?"
Kay said, "I think we can guess why he tried to stop me from bringing Tina here."
"Why?"
"Because that grave with the child's name on it is no fake. She died and was buried there. Except, of course, she wasn't dead—she'd been poisoned and only seemed to die—and Margal stole her from the grave and revived her." Gazing at Mildred, she added with a shrug, "You're new to Haiti, so I don't suppose you believe that."
"You mean Tina is what they call a zombie?"
Resia, appearing suddenly with coffee, must have caught the words "Tina" and "zombie." In Creole she muttered, "Tina séyoun zombie, ouif Then she continued to mutter while transferring three small cups of steaming black coffee and a bowl of brown sugar from a rusty tray to the table, and was still talking to herself when she hurried away. Not once had she looked at any of them.
Kay frowned at Sam. "Did you hear what she said?"
"That it was the twins Margal really wanted. What was that about?"
"The mango that poisoned Tina was one of two, given her by someone in the village. One was supposed to be for her, the other for her twin brothers."
"And she mixed them up?"
"Resia thinks so, obviously. Metellus does too."
"Twins," Sam said. "Marassas. She could be right, you know. They're special. But when Tina ate the mango, he took her anyway. Probably sold her to someone for a servant girl."
"And because she hadn't suffered brain damage, as most of them do, she recovered enough to run away. Then the priest found her."
"And when Margal got the word that you were bringing her back here, he did his damnedest to stop you. If someone from this district had been bringing her, he probably wouldn't have bothered, but a nurse from the Schweitzer—"
"Might ask questions. Might find out what happened and report him."
"Correct. And send him to prison." All at once they had a dialogue going, Sam realized. In the past, they had done it often, sometimes batting ideas back and forth for miles as they jeeped over Haiti's fantastic roads. He would gladly have kept it up, but now there were three of them.
Mildred, her cup at her lips, said, "Why did he try to stop us from getting here, Sam?"
"I can't think of a reason."
She lowered the cup to the table, spilling a little as her hand trembled. "Has something happened to my father? Something Margal doesn't want us to find out about?"
Sam thought of the man with the firewood, and lifted from his shirt pocket the photograph taken in the bocor's multicolored living room. He called the woman of the house. When she appeared, he beckoned to her and showed her the picture, pointing to the photo of Dr. Bell on Margal's chair-side table.
"Resia, do you know this man?"
She stepped back, her glance darting in horror from him to Mildred. "You two should never have had your picture taken with Margal! Are you mad?"
"Never mind that. Do you—"
"Don't you know the things he might do with a picture like this?"
"Please, Resia, do you know this man?"
She made herself calm down. "All I know is that he came through here some weeks ago with a guide, on his way to Margal's."
"Have you seen him since?"
"No. "
"You don't know if he came back from there?"
"I saw him only the once."
"All right. Thank you." Sam put the photo away and looked at Mildred, whose face was white. "Now, don't jump to conclusions," he said gently. "He could have come through here early in the morning before most people were up and around. Probably did, in fact. I'll question Metellus. I was going to, anyway."
Tonelessly, Mildred said, "Something has happened to him. Why else would Margal have tried to keep us from coming here?"
"You said your father told you he was in the capital." She only stared at him.
"Look," Sam said then, "we've got a long, hard day ahead of us tomorrow. Why don't you just relax now? I'm going to walk Kay home."
She nodded.
It was dark now. Had been for a long while. Side by side, he and Kay walked up the all but blacked-out road through the gentle tree-toad whistles and insect hummings. A scent of jasmine, almost too sweet, floated on the night air.
"Well, hey," Sam said softly.
Kay turned her head. Her dark eyes searched his face. "Hey what?"
"Here we are again."
"Here we are where?"
"Alone together. You still at war with me, pal?"
"Why didn't you write?"
"How could I, after our last night at Victor's?"
"You could have. A piece of paper. An envelope. A stamp. Just a 'Dear Kay, let's scratch that one off, shall we?' would at least have helped. It wouldn't have killed you to try."
Sam trudged on. To stop could be fatal. So long as they were climbing the path together, with the uneven ground tricking them into touching now and then, there was progress. If he stopped, he'd be back at square one.
"Kay. . . how could I write? My God, I don't even know what I did that night. Even what I said to you."
"You said plenty. Believe me."
"I was drunk."
"Not then, you weren't. But you were leaving the country, you expected me for the weekend, I didn’t show up, and you felt cheated. You still could have written to say you were sorry.
"I am sorry."
"Now you tell me."
He stopped in spite of himself. Turned to face her. Reached for her. "Kay, believe me."
She stepped back, shaking her head, "Sam, I need time."
"Of course you do. But—"
"No. I need time to get used to the idea that you're he
re at all. You knew you might run into me. You had a chance to examine your feelings and brace yourself. I didn't. Until a few hours ago, I thought you were in the States, out of my life forever. I didn't even know where in the States. All I knew was that in two years I hadn't heard from you. Not even a card at Christmas. After all we did together . . . not a line, Sam. Not a single word." She backed away again as he tried to close the gap between them. She shook her head. "No, Sam. I'm not ready for this. I'm not sure I can ever be ready again."
Sam stopped himself, not knowing what to do. This was a new Kay, one he didn't know and was in no way prepared for. He knew the one with the temper, the adventurous one, the clowning one. He knew the one who would give a peasant woman a new pair of sneakers in exchange for a worn-out sandal which she also returned to the woman. He couldn't cope with this new maturity. "All right," he said at last, "I'll wait. I'll wait a long time if I have to. You'll see."
They walked the rest of the way in silence, still touching occasionally when the dark and lumpy path nudged them together as if trying to tell them something. On reaching the fence where the crowd had gathered when Kay first arrived, they found Metellus leaning on it, a lonely figure gazing vacant-eyed up the empty road to the village.
"Did you find Fifine and the children?" Kay asked him.
"They would not come back. Tina alone is here."
"I'm sorry." She touched his hand and went past him to the house.
Sam said, "Come inside a minute, will you, Metellus? I want to ask you something."
The Haitian followed him in.
Sam produced the photo and asked the same question he had put to the woman in the house below. Holding it under a lamp, Metellus peered at the face of Dr. Bell.
"Yes, I saw this man. Ti Pierre Bastien, who used to live in this district, brought him. They were going to Legrun."
"Did you see him come back out?"
"They both came out—let me see—five days ago."
"Only five days ago? You're sure?"
"My eyes saw them, M'sieu."
"Why didn't you tell us this before taking us to Legrun this afternoon?"
"You didn't say you were looking for someone. Only that you wished to visit Margal."
