She selected several volumes from the shelves, dropping them onto the couch cushions by her feet, and took down too a nicotine-darkened stuffed toy pig; then she hopped down, sniffed the air sharply, and hurried back into the little kitchen—but the coffee was not burning.
A sudden hard knock at the door made her jump, and when she whirled toward the door she saw Kootie’s face peering in at her through the screened door-window; and then the boy opened the door and stepped in, followed by Johanna and Pete.
“You’re not on bar-time, Mom,” said Kootie, panting. “You jumped after I knocked on the door; and Dad jumped after I flicked cold hose-water on his neck.”
Pete’s graying hair was wet, and he nodded. “Not much after.”
Johanna was staring at Kootie without comprehension, so he told her, “Bar-time is when you react to things an instant before they actually happen, like you’re vibrating in the now notch and hanging over the sides a little. It’s…‘sympathetically induced resonation,’ it means somebody’s paying psychic attention to you, watching you magically.” He looked at Pete and Angelica. “I’ve been on bar-time since I woke up. When Johanna found the beasties, I jumped a second before she yelled, and when we went back to the apartment to wash our hands just now, I reached for the phone an instant before it started ringing.”
Kootie led the three of them out of the kitchen into Pete’s long dim office.
“It was one of your clients on the phone,” Pete told Angelica, “Mrs. Perez. She says her grandparents’ ghosts are gone from the iron pots you put them in; the pots aren’t even magnetic anymore, she says. Oh, and I noticed that your voodoo whosis is gone from the cabinet by our front door—the little cement guy with cowrie shells for his eyes and mouth.”
“The Eleggua figure?” said Angelica, collapsing onto the couch. “He’s—what, he’s the Lord of the Crossroads, what can it mean that he’s gone? He must have weighed thirty pounds! Solid concrete! I didn’t forget to propitiate him last week—did I, Kootie?”
Kootie shook his head somberly. “You spit rum all over him, and I put the beef jerky and the Pez dispenser in his cabinet myself:’
Pete was sniffing the stale office air. “Why does everywhere smell like burning coffee this morning?”
“Kootie,” said Angelica, “what’s going on here today?”
Kootie had hiked himself up to sit on the desk next to the buzzing black-screened television set, and he pulled his shirt up out of his pants—the bandage taped to his side was blotted with red, and even as they looked at it a line of blood trickled down to his belt. “And my left hand’s numb,” he said, flexing his fingers, “and I had to rest twice, carrying the dead beasties, because I’ve got no strength in my legs.”
He looked up at his adopted mother. “We’re in the middle of winter,” he went on, in a tense but flat voice. “This is the season when I sometimes dream that I can…sense the American West Coast. This morning—” He paused to cock his head: “—still, in fact—I’ve got that sense while I’m awake. What I dreamed of was a crazy woman running through a vineyard, waving a bloody wand with ivy vines wrapped around it and a pinecone stuck on the end of it.” He pulled his shirt back down and tucked it in messily. “Some balance of power has shifted drastically somewhere—and somebody is paying attention to me; somebody’s going to be coming here. And I don’t think the Solville foxing measures are going to fool this person.”
“Nobody can see through them!” said Johanna loyally. Her late husband, Solomon “Sol” Shadroe, had bought the apartment building in 1974 because its architecture confused psychic tracking, and he had spent nearly twenty years adding rooms and wings onto the structure, and re-routing the water and electrical systems, and putting up dozens of extraneous old TV antennas with carob seed-pods and false teeth and old radio parts hung from them, to intensify the effect; the result was an eccentric stack and scatter of buildings and sheds and garages and conduit, and even now, more than two years after the old man’s death, the tenants still called the rambling old compound Solville.
Pete Sullivan was the manager and handyman for the place now, and he had dutifully kept up the idiosyncratic construction and maintenance programs; now his lean, tanned face was twisted in a squinting smile of apprehension. “So what is it that you sense, son?”
“There’s a—” Kootie said uncertainly, his unfocused gaze moving across the ceiling. “I can almost see it—a chariot—or a…a gold cup? Maybe it’s a tarot card from the Cups suit, paired with the Chariot card from the Major Arcana?—coming here.” He gave Johanna a mirthless smile. “I think it could find me, even here, and somebody might be riding in it, or carrying it.”
Angelica was nodding angrily. “This is the thing, isn’t it, Kootie, that was all along going to happen? The reason why we never moved away from here?”
“Why we stopped running,” ventured Pete. “Why we’ve been…standing our little ground.”
“Why Kootie is an iyawo,” said Johanna, sighing and nodding in the kitchen doorway. “Why this place was first built, from the earthquake wreck of that ghost house. And the—”
“Kootie is not an iyawo,” Angelica interrupted, pronouncing the feminine Yoruba noun as if it were an obscenity. “He hasn’t undergone the kariocha initiation. Tell her, Pete.”
Kootie looked at his adopted father and smiled. “Yeah,” he said softly, “tell her, Dad.”
Pete Sullivan pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and cleared his throat. “Uh, ‘it’s not a river in Egypt,’” he told his wife, quoting a bit of pop-psychology jargon that he knew she hated.
She laughed, though with obvious reluctance. “I know it’s not. The Nile, denial—I know the difference. How is this denial, what I’m saying? Kariocha is a very specific ritual—shave the head, cut the scalp, get three specially initiated drummers to play the consecrated bata drums!—and it just has not been done with Kootie.”
“Not to the letter of the law,” said Pete, shaking out a cigarette and flipping it over the backs of his fingers; “but in the…spirit?” He snapped a wooden match and inhaled smoke, then squeezed the lit match in his fist, which was empty when he opened it again. “Come on, Angie! All the formalities aside, basically a kariocha initiation is putting a thing like an alive-and-kicking ghost inside of somebody’s head, right? Call it a ‘ghost’ or call it an ‘orisha.’ It makes the person who hosts it…what, different So—well, you tell me what state Kootie was in when we found him two years ago. I suppose he’s not still an omo, since the orisha left his head, voluntarily…but it did happen to the boy.”
“I saw him when he was montado,” agreed Johanna, “possessed, in this very kitchen, with that yerba buena y tequila telephone. He had great ashe, the boy’s orisha did, great luck and power, to make a telephone out of mint and tequila and a pencil sharpener, and then call up dead people on it.” She looked across at the boy and smiled sadly: “You’re not a virgin in the head anymore, are you, Kootie?”