‘Hey, Papa,’ he said, and sailed one of the coins at him. It missed, clinking against the wall. But even the miss caused Papa to lose concentration, and the Baron slashed and touched his hip.
Papa let out a yip and danced away, steadying himself; he cast a vengeful look at Donnell, and as Donnell sailed another coin, he snarled. The Baron nicked his wrist with a second pass and avoided a return swipe.
‘You done lost the flow, Papa,’ chanted the Baron. ‘That iron gettin’ heavy in your hand. Your balls is startin’ to freeze up. You gon’ die, motherfucker!’
Donnell kept throwing the coins, zinging them as hard as he could, and then - as he threw it, his fingers recognized the bulge of Mr Brisbeau’s lucky piece - the last coin struck Papa near his eye. He clapped his hand to the spot, and in doing so received a cut high on his knife arm. He backed up the stairs, ducking to keep the Baron in view; he half-turned to run, but something swung down from the open hatch and thunked against his head. He toppled into the hold face downward. A board fell across his legs.
‘For God’s sake!’ Jocundra yelled. ‘Hurry!’
As the Baron hustled him up the stairs, Donnell had a final glimpse of the fiery smile floating eerily in the dark, the eyes already absorbed into a wash of flame. Then Jocundra, her face smoke-stained, hauled him toward the rail and onto the dock. The Baron slipped off the mooring line and heaved against the boat with his shoulder, trying to push it out into the current.
‘Gimme a hand, damn it!’ he said. ‘Else this whole place liable to go up!’
All heaving together, they managed to nudge the boat a couple of feet off the dock, and there it sat, too heavy for the sluggish current to move.
Donnell collapsed against a piling, and Jocundra buried her face in his shoulder, holding him, shaking. His mind whirled with remnant threads of the strange story he had told the pets, and he almost wished he had not been interrupted so he could have learned the ending himself. He had been near to death, he realized, yet he had not been afraid, and he was thankful to the possessive arrogance of his inner self for sparing him fear. But now he reacted to the fear and held to Jocundra, exulting in the jolt of her pulse against his arm.
‘That goddamn Clothilde,’ said the Baron; he was peeling his shirt away from the cut on his chest. ‘Seem like she gon’ have her funeral party after all.’
The way the sternwheeler burned was equally beautiful and monstrous. Lines of flame crisscrossed the walls, touching off patterns buried in the paint, repeating the veve of Mounanchou and Clothilde’s face over and over again, as well as petro designs: knives stuck into hearts, hanged men, beheaded goats. Little trains of fire scooted along the railings, illuminating the gingerbread work and support posts. Torches flared at the corners of the roof. Other flames chased each other in and out of passageways with merry abandon, sparking windowframes and hatch covers, until the entire boat was dressed in mystic configurations and fancywork of yellow-red flames, as though for a carnival. Amid a groaning of timbers, the smokestack cannonaded sparks and fell into the bayou, venting a great hiss, and thus lightened, the boat began to turn in a stately clockwise circle, its fiery designs eroding into the general conflagration. The paint of the hull blistered into black wartlike protuberances, the sky above the raging upper deck was distorted by a transparency of flame, and the sound of the fire was the sound of bones splintering in the mouth of a beast. A horrid reek drifted on the breeze.
The boat was about twenty feet off the dock, the prow pointing almost directly toward them, when Papa Salvatino stumbled out of the hatch, coughing, his trousers smoldering. He staggered along the deck, looked up, and they heard him scream as a blazing section of the upper railing fell away and dropped upon him, closing a burning fist around him and bearing him over the side. Charred boards floated off, and in a moment his head reappeared. He raised his arm. It seemed a carefree gesture, a wave to his friends on shore. The boat, continuing to turn, blocked their view of him, turning and turning, a magician’s black castle spinning through fire to another dimension, and when it had passed over the spot where he had been, the water was empty of flotsam, undisturbed, reflecting a silken blue like a sheet from which all the wrinkles have been removed by the passage of a hand.
Chapter 17
August 18 - September 12, 1987
‘Musta got caught up in the mangrove,’ said the Baron when Papa Salvatino’s body could not be found. ‘Or else,’ he said, and grinned, not in the least distressed, ‘there’s a gator driftin’ out there somewhere’s with a mean case of the shits.’
Otille, however, was not amused. Screams and the noise of breakage were reported from the attic, and the ‘friends’ slunk about the downstairs, fleeing to the cabins at the slightest suspicion of her presence. But to Jocundra’s knowledge, Otille left her rooms only once between the day of Papa’s death and the completion of the veve - a period of more than two weeks - and then it was to oversee the punishment of Clea, Simpkins and Downey. She had them tied to the porch railing of the main house and beaten with bamboo canes, the beating applied by a fat, swarthy man apparently imported especially for the occasion. Clea screeched and sobbed, Downey whimpered and begged, Simpkins - to Jocundra’s surprise - howled like a dog with every stroke. The ‘friends’ huddled together in front of the porch, sullen and fearful, and in the manner of an evil plantation queen, Otille stood cold and aloof in the doorway. Her black mourning dress blended so absolutely with the boards that it seemed to Jocundra her porcelain face and hands were disembodied, inset, the antithesis of the ebony faces and limbs inside.
Without Otille’s demands to contend with, Donnell relaxed and became less withdrawn, though he still would not talk about his thoughts or his days among the pets. But for a time it was as if they were back at Mr Brisbeau’s. They walked and made love and explored the crannies of the house. They were free of pets and ‘friends,’ of everyone except the Baron, who continued to exercise the role of bodyguard. Yet as the veve’s date of completion neared, Donnell grew edgy. ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ he would ask, and she would answer, ‘You believe it’s going to, don’t you?’ He would nod, appear confident for a while, but the question always popped up again. ‘If it doesn’t,’ she suggested, ‘there’s always the project.’ He said he would have to think about that.
Jocundra had visited the construction site often, but because of the swarm of workmen and the veve’s unfinished state, she had gained no real impression of how it would look. And so, on the night Donnell first used it, when she climbed to the top of the last conical hill and gazed down into the depression where it lay, she was taken aback by its appearance. Three tons of copper, seventy feet long and fifty wide, composed of welded strips and mounted on supports a couple of feet high driven into the ground. Surrounding the clearing was a jungly thickness of oaks, many of them dead and vine-shrouded, towered over by a lone cypress; the spot from which Jocundra, Otille and the Baron were to observe was arched over by two epiphyte-laden branches. Floodlights were hung in the trees, angled downward and rippling up the copper surfaces. Bats, dazed by the lights, skimmed low above the veve and thumped into the oak trunks. The ground below it had been bulldozed into a circle of black dirt, and this made the great design seem like a glowing brand poised to sear the earth.