Around eight, I take Luz home. I have a lot of stuff to do tonight. She’s clinging and fretful, however, and I must stay with her, up in her little garret room, until she’s asleep. Downstairs again, I take another amphetamine, no, two, just to make sure I stay up on the plateau, where there is a good view. I can’t fall into the crevasse now, uh-uh.
I haul out the box and remove my divining bag, and some bags and bottles and soiled envelopes containing various organic flakes and fragments? komo?and the jar of kadoul I mixed up the other day, and my Mauser. I arrange these all on the kitchen table. Before starting, I look into the manila envelope that lawyer Finnegan gave me. Inside is my passport, my checkbook, my VISA and Amex cards, my New York driver’s licence, and a minute cellular phone, with a note taped to it, in Josey’s felt-tipped scrawclass="underline" Janey?call Dad! auto #1 love J. Oh Josey! How long would you have kept the dead girl’s things had I really done it?
So the crying starts again, and through tears I seek and push the right buttons. The tiny thing reaches out into the wireless nexus and gets my father. By then, of course, I am honking like a walrus in heat, and I say how sorry I am, and he tells me not to think about it, that he never believed that I was dead. I asked him why not, as I thought I had done a pretty good job. He said he knew that if I really wanted to kill myself I would have used a gun. He said he knew I didn’t have anything to do with Mary’s death, and that he knew I really loved her, even though she didn’t love me. I was amazed: we’re always so surprised when our parents can figure us out, we all think we’re so secret and clever. He asked when I was coming home. I said I had some things to take care of here, but not long at all. Then we talked about my mom for a while.
He asked me if he could help. I knew what he meant, and I said, no, he couldn’t. I was going to a place where even the red handle wouldn’t help, and Josey couldn’t track me down for another rescue. He told me to take care and trust in God.
After we hung up, I finished my hysterics, weeping for my family, for Mary, and my poor gorgeous crazy mom, and Dad of course, but I’d always been able to cry for him. Then I washed my face in the tepid water of the kitchen sink and got down to work.
It is strangely the case that a particular arrangement and combination of organic materials, which have been handled in a ritual way, will perform acts definable as magic, or prevent them within a particular area. You can make, for example, a ch’akadoulen and plant it in front of a guy’s house, and he will gradually fade away and die. Or suddenly decide to kill his family and have to be shot. Whether or not he’s a believer. So I carefully compound my scant store of komo into tetechinte, countermagic. I only have enough komo for five of them. They don’t look like much: little bundles of bark and leaves, smeared with oily substances, strong-smelling, each wrapped in an intricate web of red, black, white, and yellow threads.
I go outside and bury one at each corner of my house. There is a smell of distant burning, nastily hydrocarbonish, and a red glow to the north, and low heavy clouds, no breath of wind, although the clouds seem to be writhing along, lit from below. They must have tried to take him, and now he’s showing them what he can do if he likes. He doesn’t understand that they will all die before admitting that what he is is real, that they will squat, if it should come to that, in the glowing ruins of their cities and say, coincidence, random, bad luck, natural disaster, unknown terrorists, mass hallucinations, like a mantra. And he will still be invisible, the poor man.
The last little bundle I take up to the loft and hang from the ceiling above Luz’s head. Over my own neck I draw the amulet Ulune gave me when I left Danolo, a little red-dyed leather pouch, into which I have never peered.
Now I clean my Mauser 96, a restful chore. It has no screws in its mechanism at all. Each part pops free with a precisely directed pressure and snaps in with a satisfying click, just where it belongs; the smell of the oil rag reminds me of home, of Dad. After that, I take the rounds out of the box magazine and rub the bullets with a substance designed by Olo technicians to make them penetrate magical objects or beings. Then I reload.
I need a bath, now, to clean the jail stink off my skin, a long hot one in a huge bathtub like they have at Sionnet, but what I have instead is my little chipped one. I stay in it a long time, and wash the last of poor Dolores’s shit-brown out of my hair. After I emerge, I rub the haze from the mirror and contemplate Jane recidivus, trying not to recall the undying ghosts of this same assessing gaze, from my youth, when I cried, and cursed my plain face, and hated my sister, whom the mirror loved. I see the perfect teeth of the rich, quite startling eyes, if I do say so, nose too big, jaw too strong, teeny tiny little skinny lips like worms … At any rate, a lot better looking than Dolores. I get out my barber scissors, spread newspaper, and snip away, snip away, until I have made a rough dark-yellow helmet, jaw length on the sides and back, with a center parting, the somewhat jockish look I had in sophomore year, when I played a lot of field hockey. My husband always liked me to wear it long, and I did, down to the waist in back, braided and pinned up, a pain in the ass in Africa, but the Africans loved it. They used to touch it on the street, like touching a snake, for luck. I carefully gather up all the cut hair, down to the tiniest fragment I can find, and flush it away in the toilet. A little habit in the sorcery biz, practically the first thing Ulune taught me.
I don my ratty blue chenille Goodwill bathrobe and sit in the kitchen in the dark with my gun. The air is stifling, loaded heavy with the usual Miami perfume: jasmine, rot, car exhaust, a rumor of salt water, plus tonight the stink of burned things and … just now, the dulfana, and a dead rat odor. At the screen door I look down in the yard. There are three of them, standing motionless in a group. Paarolawatset. I can’t see their features, but one of them has the sagging shape of the man Paz called Swett.
He doesn’t want me wandering away again, it appears, and has dispatched watch-things to trail me, or maybe he fears for my safety in the chaos he’s causing, and these are guards. That would be like Witt, to think of that.
I sit down and drink water. The thought of food is nearly as nauseating to me as the thought of sleep. I hear thumps and scratching sounds outside, calls of animals and birds whose natural habitat is not South Florida. I get my journals from the box and review my notes, as for a big test. I should be more or less safe from ordinary jinja, his sendings, because Ulune was a major power and he gave me some good stuff. I wish he were here now, Ulune. He wouldn’t actually protect me. He sure didn’t when I was witched out of my hut by Witt and Durakne Den. But I always got the feeling that Ulune was playing a much larger game than the usual sorcerers’ spats, that if he thought it was required, he could have crushed both Witt and his witch teacher like cockroaches. Let Ifa unfold, Jeanne, he would say. Don’t grab at the folds like a greedy child tearing the peel from a fruit. The do-nothing phase of life, as sensei used to put it, so hard for us Americans.
So I wait, and after a while … an hour? A couple of hours? … there is another unfolding. I hear steps on the shell gravel of the drive, and steps on my stairs. I work the action on the Mauser, chambering a magic bullet, and point at the screen door. There is a shadow there, a face. It’s him, Witt. I take aim, not at all confident in my ability to shoot, not even now. Or that the bullet will have any effect.