“Very bad.” Doctor Oliver felt the truth of this in his spleen at the moment he said it.
“And you know, I hate it that they killed that poor woman. I just don’t- All right, there’s no less point in that than in anything, but it really didn’t have to be her.”
Charlie Chapo drained his rum glass and shook himself all over, then turned on Doctor Oliver a lopsided smile. “I just need to clean out my head is all.” There was something in the way he said it that made the doctor think he could lift off the top of his skull and rinse out the inside and replace it. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”
“Go for it,” Doctor Oliver said. “There’s even soap. It’s from Taiwan.”
By the time Charlie returned to the table, it was completely dark. The barefoot servants had lit the lamps, and the fires on the barricades seemed much further off-as did the dark portents of Charlie’s earlier words. On the strength of Magloire’s quick visit, Doctor Oliver had dry-swallowed one of his two remaining pills and he now felt quite agreeably insulated from… what had it been?
“Without fear of the nighted wyvern,” he pronounced in a fat mellow tone, as Charlie hove up to the table, still raking water out of his thin hair with his fingers.
“Something cheered you up,” Charlie said, raising an eyebrow as he sat down.
“I ordered for us,” Doctor Oliver said, and at that moment a waiter began setting down platters of poulè kreyòl and banann peze. They ate without talking very much, which was the custom of the country. Or, rather, Doctor Oliver pushed his food around his plate, since the drug he had taken destroyed his appetite. As the dishes were cleared, he ordered them postprandial glasses of the marvelous rum. Just beyond the hotel’s outward rippling of light, drums had begun a rich insistent rhythm. The ceremonies Charlie had mentioned would be gunning up now, not far away.
“Thanks for putting me onto Magloire.”
“He take care of you?” Charlie seemed pleased.
Doctor Oliver reached for the envelope in his shirt pocket, then stopped. “He said something to me: Fòk nan pwen.” He couldn’t remember the rest of the phrase. “I didn’t get it.”
“Magloire said that?” Charlie’s eyes had narrowed. “That’s Bizango, basically. Vodou for most people here is Ginen, which is a whole lot like charismatic Christianity from all I’ve seen of it, but there’s this other thing that goes on, a kind of inversion of it, I mean. Left-handed.”
The word sinister surfaced in Oliver’s mind, like a paper flower blooming in a glass. Charlie Chapo’s left hand pumped on the tightly folded triangle of red.
“I mean,” Charlie Chapo was saying, “from the ougan’s point of view, well, yeah, Ginen is all sweetness and light, but it’s hard to get paid for that, see? So most of them work with the left hand too, that’s how they put it. For people who’d sell their mother or eat their own children to get what they want, sometimes…”
“What do they want?”
“Power. Sex. Money. Power.” Charlie shrugged. “Same as you, right? It’s not like these are the only people in the world who’ll throw a lot away for immediate gratification. In the long run it’s not such a good idea, because they have to bind their spirits to make them deliver like that, and the spirits can be pretty angry once they get loose. But in the short term, fòk nan pwen pou’m pa jwen.”
“That’s it,” said Doctor Oliver. “What does it mean?”
“There’d have to not be any for me to not get some.”
Charlie frowned. “Let me see what he got for you.”
The jab of anxiety Doctor Oliver felt was, thanks to his pill, no worse than being prodded with a hair. He pulled the small red and gilt envelope from his shirt pocket.
“Huh,” said Charlie Chapo. “That’s a ghost-money envelope. I get them in Chinatown and use them to give money to people down here. Well, no reason Magloire wouldn’t have a few.”
When Charlie Chapo opened the envelope and curled his index finger into it, Doctor Oliver felt a stronger stab: somebody’s messing with my dope. Charlie Chapo rubbed a generous amount of white powder between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know,” he said, and dragged his finger through a drop of water on the table. A smear like white paint appeared on the wood of the tabletop.
“I wouldn’t run this up my nose.” Charlie caught Oliver’s eye. “It’s lime, I think.”
“What, quick lime?”
“No, no! They’re not trying to hurt you. It’s like chalk, basically. They use it for whitewash.” Charlie closed the envelope and flicked it across the table like a paper football. “What did you pay for it?”
“Twenty U.S. ”
“Right,” said Charlie. “Kind of suspiciously cheap, don’t you think?” He looked out the ring of local light toward the fires on the barricades. “I dunno, though, in ’97 I could have bought an assault rifle for that in the capital. Twenty dollars.”
“Ever wish you had?” Doctor Oliver managed to ask, from the depths of the chill now locked around his heart.
“Sometimes, yeah,” Charlie said. “But you know, if you’ve got one of those things, the odds go up somebody will get killed with it.” He turned his head back into the circle of lamplight. “Don’t feel so bad-you can try again tomorrow.”
“Why not?” Doctor Oliver said. “Why not feel bad?”
“What I love about this country is that magical thinking actually does work here. But it’s got to have a little something to work with, you see? Like Magloire-in better circumstances he’d be a completely honest person. As it is, he has to cut a corner sometimes.”
The drums had grown louder and there was chanting now too. Charlie Chapo turned his head into the wind that came constantly off the bay, flipped up his red bandanna, and knotted it tight to the nape of his neck. He’s going to leave me, Doctor Oliver thought. Charlie leaned toward him across the table.
“Understand, Magloire wanted you to have what you wanted. His desire is for you to have what you need. And for him to have what he needs and… so somebody has to spin straw into gold. If the charm had worked like he wanted it to, you’d come out with the coin instead of the dried leaf. As it is…” Standing, Charlie clapped Doctor Oliver on the shoulder. “Thanks for dinner. And the shower. And what the hell, it’s only twenty bucks.”
After his delivery to Doctor Oliver, Magloire returned to the street where his mother lived with Anise and his son. Anise sat on a low stool holding the child on her knee and stirring an iron pot which released a rich smell of diri kole ak pwa. Beyond, in the darkness, his mother roasted coffee; a rim of red coal outlined the bottom curve of her cauldron. His mouth watered at the smell of the rice and beans, but although Anise was using provisions he had provided, he did not mean to share the meal. By the grace of Doctor Oliver he had already eaten quite well once today and that was better than he often managed. Also, it was easy enough to unlock the cabinet and slip away with the second bag while Anise was busy over the food.
With the neck of the loose cloth bag in his hand, he stood on the Boulevard de la Mer and watched the bone-white moon rising from the sea. His thoughts scattered, to the point he was not completely in one of his minds or another. Some men along the breakwater were fishing, each with a hook and a line rolled around a chip of wood, and a couple of students had clustered under the electric lamps to study their homework. Behind and above him, beyond the lights of Doctor Oliver’s hotel perched on its eminence, the drumming tightened, intensified, and there was a lone voice singing.