Then suddenly I’m pushed away and a man is kneeling on the back of my dancing partner and attaching handcuffs to his wrists. I see that it is Detective Paz. I start to walk away, but he shouts at me and leaves the boy and comes up and grabs my arm. I look pointedly at his grip and he lets go. He is breathing a little hard, but he is not sweating and his beautiful jacket, shirt, and tie are unrumpled. He says, trying a smile, “You almost got mugged. You can’t just leave.”
I stare at him through my tinted spectacles. I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That guy, the homey. He was trying to mug you. You would’ve been in trouble if I hadn’t come along.”
I give him a look. He shrugs off the little lie with a grin. I say, “You’re mistaken, Detective. He tripped and fell. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.” I take off before he can say anything else. Obviously, he has been following me. Terrific.
I drive down Flagler, past pets, which seems to be closed, and to my transmission guy, a few blocks west. I leave the car with him, and he promises three days, which means a week. Do I even need my car anymore? The notion of physical escape seems to have vanished, or at least escape by land. While I wait for whatever is going to happen, and still assuming that I am not still in dreamland, I can take Luz to school and shop on foot, or maybe I’ll buy a secondhand bike and a bike seat. I use the pay phone to call a cab and stand out on the street to wait. The transmission guy seems to be staring at me in an odd way. I check my reflection in the plate glass of his window. There seems nothing wrong. I move toward the curb.
Next to the transmission place is one of those hole-in-the-wall cafes that consists only of a service hatch and a row of stools outside. These are occupied by an assortment of middle-aged men sipping from tiny cups. They are staring at me, too; their faces are full of vague aggression; their eyes are dark and hot. I direct my gaze across the street to where a group of people are waiting for a jitney. I cross the street. I could take the jitney east on Flagler, to where I can catch a Metro train to the Grove. This would save some money, but I am reluctant. The configuration of the group is profoundly menacing; I read threat in the way they are standing: two Latina women in tan servant’s uniforms; a dark woman with shopping bags, with a little girl and an older boy in tow; a zombie; two thin Oriental guys in cook’s whites speaking Cuban Spanish; and a very fat copper-skinned woman with a cane and a palm fan, all typically what you would find at any such corner in low-rent Miami, except maybe for the zombie. The Olo call such creatures paarolawats.
They are staring at me, not directly, but sidelong, and when I look away, I can feel their eyes on my back. No jitney, then. Wait for the cab. The dispatcher said ten minutes, although, really, my Spanish is not that hot, maybe he said thirty. Or never.
The paarolawats comes a little closer to me. A faint breeze stirs (maybe from the fan of the fat lady!) and I catch his smell, a horrible reek of old alcohol and unwashed, perhaps even slightly putrid flesh, and, of course, dulfana. This one is a crumpled-looking man, anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five years, wearing wino rags, balding, whose freckled skin’s base color is that of a cardboard carton left out in the sun and rain. He’s looking right at me, out of his dead eyes; he shuffles a step closer, then another. The jitney arrives at the curb, an old Ford Econoline van driven by a skeletal Haitian. The waiting people board it, casting baleful looks at me as they pass, or so it seems.
The jitney pulls away, and I’m left alone with the paarolawats. He slips-slides toward me in that horrible way they have, which I remember even though I have only seen one before. You’re not supposed to let them touch you, I remember that, too. They’re loaded with all kinds of exotic chemicals; their skin is dripping with witch secretions. The horror movies have it right for once. I back away. I am thinking, This would be a good time to wake up, if this is a dream, and if not I am going to have to run for it, if that fucking cab doesn’t get here in one minute, and then a voice behind me says, “Hey, there, Eightball, what’s happening?”
It is the detective, again. He is walking toward the paarolawats, with his hand out. He is going to shake hands with a zombie! I move quickly to stand in his way and I say, “Detective, I just remembered something I forgot to tell you.”
“Yeah? That’s great, ma’am. Do you know old Eightball Swett, here? Mr. Swett is one of our colorful neighborhood characters …”
I grab his sleeve. “No, he’s not. Could we go to your car? I mean right now!” Because the thing has begun to move, a couple of quick shuffles and he’s reaching out his hand. They can move pretty fast over short distances, although, depending on how ripe they are, if they push it any they tend to lose bits and pieces.
The detective picks up my tone and lets me drag him to his white Impala. We both get in, and the paarolawats is right there as I close the door with a slam. He paws at the window and a bit of him sticks to the glass like bird shit. Now I’m practically crying, “Please drive, please drive drive drive drive drive!”
When we are well away, he says, “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”
“I was just nervous. That man made me nervous.”
“Nervous?” he says. “That palsied piss-bum made you nervous, when less than an hour ago I saw you take down a big strong gangbanger practically without breaking stride?” I am silent. He says, “We need to have a talk, Jane.”
“I told you, my name is Dolores Tuoey,” I say, barely convincing myself.
“Jane Doe. I should say, Dr. Doe, really. I read your paper on the Olo. Some of it went past me, but what I could understand was pretty amazing.”
Last shot. “I’m not Jane Doe. People were always getting us confused.”
“Really? Whereabouts was this?”
“Bamako. In Mali. I was a nurse-midwife there and she was doing some anthro work upcountry in the Boucle de Baoule. We ran into each other from time to time and … people commented. Jane’s dead, I heard.”
“Yeah, and she must be buried under a plain tablet in Calvary Cemetery in Waltham, Mass., with ‘Sister Mary Dolores Tuoey, S.M.’ on it. You know, Jane, the problem with phony ID, especially if it’s based on a real person, is that it’s like a model of the Golden Gate Bridge made out of toothpicks. They look sort of okay, but they won’t bear any real weight.”
He gives me a bright cat smile. “So why’d you fake the suicide?”
“I have to pick up my daughter,” I croak. My mouth feels full of fine sand.
“Yeah, she’s at Providence. Okay, no problem.” He turned south onto Dixie Highway. “Actually there is a small problem: where did you get the daughter? You sure didn’t have one when you sailed away into the sunset. Your dad would have noticed it. I met your dad the other day, as a matter of fact. He doesn’t miss much, Jack Doe.”
I say nothing, feeling miserable, like a kid caught out in a dumb fib. In silence, then, we arrive at Providence. Luz is with her little gang of girls, gossiping. I wave and call out. Luz comes up to the strange car, her face clouding. I get out and hug her, and tell her our car is getting fixed and the nice policeman from this morning is going to drive us home.
Which he does, and makes no move to drive away out of my life, but gets out and follows us up the stairs as if invited. I make Luz her snack, carrot cake and lemonade, popping another two pills privily as I do so, and I offer some refreshment to him. He accepts, and we all snack away like a thermonuclear family. Luz is uncharacteristically quiet; she is used to the dyad, or Polly’s family, or school, and also she picks up the tension. I prod her about her day. She sang. Some of the kids got their costumes, but she did not. She hopes to be a robin or an owl. Or a fish. As we talk, I see that she keeps casting sidelong looks at him, at her little arm and his big hand and wrist on the table, and no wonder, they are almost exactly the same color. She asks if she can go play with Eleanor across the street. I watch her from the landing as she trots across and rings Dawn Slotsky’s bell.