She blushed. “I’m sorry. It’s automatic. They were so good.”
“I know they’re good, Jane. That’s why you should’ve saved some for me. Jeez, I’m telling you about the worst day of my life, and you take advantage to hog all the torticas.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and he saw that she was not talking about the cookies. After a while he added, “I went back and laid all this on my mother, and she gave me another beating, the last one I ever got from her. I ran away. I split that night, and hiked up Dixie Highway, hitched a couple of rides. I slept on the beach at Hallandale for two nights, and the next day the cops grabbed me up. They shipped me home, and it was ‘Did you finish your homework?’ She never mentioned Yoiyo again, or what happened after. Meanwhile, it didn’t take a detective to figure it out. She wanted to get a catering truck, and like a peasant, she went to the local big man, Calderone, the Guantanamero. She needed eight K to get the truck and a stake to start a business. She was nineteen. And how does a beautiful black woman get eight grand from Senor Calderone? I mean what does she use for fucking collateral? He probably did her right on the couch in his office, or bent her over his great big desk. And the result was me.” He laughed. “My sad story.”
“It is a sad story. I figured it was something like that. And of all the cops in Miami, it’s you that picks up this case, that shows up at my place. This is how it happens, the way you get allies.”
He wiped his face with his napkin, and reassembled his personality behind its cover. “Right. Me and my mother and a chicken are going to help you fight our invisible man. Looney Tunes.”
“Yes, be cynical,” she said, her voice low and urgent. “It’s been a couple of hours, and your mind is reconstructing the consensual reality. All that, the things you saw and did, they couldn’t have really happened, the murder at that hotel, and arresting Witt, and the cops shooting one another, and Barlow turning into someone else, and craziness spreading through the city. Get a good night’s sleep and it’s back to normal. But it won’t be. The only way back to normal is through the magic.”
“So what do we have to do? Sit in a circle and chant and kill a pigeon?”
“It will become clear to you what you have to do in the event. Mainly, I’ll be more or less out of it for what could be a long time. You need to take care of me?I mean this body?and take care of Luz.”
“And the chicken. Don’t forget the chicken. What’s the chicken going to do? Peck at his nose?”
She turned her eyes away from him, as if embarrassed. He felt ashamed, in fact, although he was not certain of what. He said, “Jane … be serious now: can you imagine me trying to explain all this to my mother?”
“You won’t have to explain it to your mother,” she said. “She’ll come to my house, at the right time.”
“Really? And how are you going to arrange that?”
“Because it’s the place to be. It’s the Super Bowl. Your mother’s a player in this, an oriate. She wants to help. You’re not a player, so you have to decide on some other basis whether you are going to fulfill Ifa’s oracle or not. It’ll start tomorrow night, I’m guessing. If he’s writing now, he’ll write all night and crash about dawn, and he’ll wake up around three or four, get a big breakfast, revise the stuff he wrote the previous night and be ready to step out around seven.”
“He’s writing? He’s cutting up women and doing God knows what all around the city, and then he goes home and writes?”
She looked surprised at the question. “Well, yes. He’s a writer. The other stuff is just for background and experience. It’s Captain Dinwiddie. He’s writing an epic poem of that name about the black experience. You read it all in the journal, didn’t you? That’s why he went to Africa in the first place. But he was blocked for the conclusion. I mean, where’s the payback, for slavery and the ghettos and segregation and all that? It’s an artistic imbalance. Lucifer has to be flung from heaven. Faust has to beat the devil. And Africa has to triumph over Cracker Nation. Originally he just thought he would simply make it up, but that was before he became a witch. Now he’s writing nonfiction, so to speak.”
“That’s crazy!”
“You keep saying that. It’s not helpful. My friend Marcel used to say that sometimes life serves up situations that only crazy actions can resolve. This is obviously one of them, and …”
She stiffened. A look of pain came over her face. He heard a long hiss of breath through her teeth.
“What’s wrong? Jane?”
“I … was wrong. Here. He’s here.” Her voice was low, strangled.
“Where?” Paz looked wildly around the restaurant. Sweat burst out on his forehead. There was something funny now about all the patrons. They weren’t eating and chatting and laughing, as they usually did. They were staring at Paz and Jane, and there was something odd about their faces, they seemed peculiarly flat and brutal, the flesh sagging like candle wax. They had too many teeth.
Jane was groaning something. There was a crash from the kitchen, and shouting. Someone screamed; it went on and on. Jane was trying to say something. Her eyes bulged with the effort. Paz bent closer.
“What? What is it? What’s happening?”
“Escape by water … get over water,” she managed to say. “Take her!”
Paz felt dull and heavy. He had drunk too much, he thought. He really should call it a night, walk on home and crawl into bed. He got up. Jane looked like a corpse. Everyone in the place looked like a corpse. He started to leave.
His mother came across the dining room, like a golden galleon under full sail. Light seemed to pour off her; her face was bright and covered with fine sweat. It looked inhuman, like the oiled wood of a statue.
“Son, son, take them to the boat, take them both to the boat! Do it now!” She reached up over his head and dropped something on a leather thong around his neck. Paz stared at her stupidly. “You know about the boat?”
She struck him on the face. It sounded like a gunshot. “Jesus Maria, will you go!” she cried.
Paz was in the kitchen, hot, bright, full of noise. Cesar the chef was huddled in the corner, weeping. The scullion was smashing plates, throwing them one by one against the wall. Then Paz was in the alley behind the restaurant. He couldn’t walk very well, he discovered, because he had more than the usual number of legs. No, that was because he was supporting Jane Doe on his hip, with his arm around her. Deadweight, and moaning. He hated Jane Doe, he wanted to throw her in the Dumpster. There was a weight pulling on the other arm, some kind of horrible hairy animal, clutching at him, it was going to suck his blood … no, that was the child, he had to do something with the child, something to do with water. Throw her in the water? That didn’t seem right. The leather thong was cutting into his neck. He stumbled in another direction. The pressure let up. That was good. He saw Jane’s car far away. The leather thong wanted him to go to the car.