Anaea went numb.
“They’ll put me back to sleep, Vanessa. At least you got to know me in my prime.”
He gave her a kiss. She laughed and tried to push his face away.
“You’re stinky, Papa Buck!” she said through her giggles.
“And you’re beautiful just like your mama and your grandma. Now go back to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“OK, Papa Buck. G’night!” she said as she weaved her way between Jack and Phil again and back to her bedroom.
Anaea hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath for the last minute until the pain in her chest became almost unbearable. She inhaled sharply, felt a bit lightheaded, and held the refrigerator door for balance.
“I’ll take this baby with me so I’m not alone in bed again,” Buck said, raised the rum bottle for emphasis, and pushed past the men. “Excuse me, ladies.”
Buck disappeared down a corridor with the slamming of his bedroom door punctuating his exit. Anaea slumped down the side of the refrigerator and sat on the kitchen floor.
“Who is that?” she asked no one in particular. “That isn’t the man I grew up with. That isn’t the man I loved and took care of for twenty years. I need you to take Vanessa with you and Phil tonight, Jack. I… I don’t want her here and I don’t want her at the ceremony tomorrow.”
“OK,” Jack agreed. “I’ll pack a bag and get her… quietly.”
“Whoever that is,” Phil reasoned, “that isn’t your Buck.”
Anaea sat outside Buck’s door for the rest of the night and into the early morning. There was nothing to do but watch and wait in the silent darkness.
VI: A Dust Full Of Hand
Buchanan Robinson said nothing during his last meal of Lazarákia and a bitter drink made from tree bark called mauby. The ride to the island’s east coast was another half hour of silence between him and Anaea, a silence unbroken even after arriving at the immortuary to Yewande Ayodele’s barely restrained concern in her greeting. Buck didn’t ask where Jack or Vanessa were or if there would be anyone else but him and the two women on the immortuary’s pool deck for the ceremony. The only emotion Buck showed was when he stripped naked before following the two women in white robes into the infinity pool. He liked that their eyes took in all of his magnificent body, and he took special notice of how uncomfortable his bare flesh made his granddaughter. Buck, naked as he was reborn, floated between the women with Anaea’s hand on the back of his head.
“Conduct life gently that you may die a good death…” immortician Ayodele began.
Buck’s almost unblinking eyes stared right into Anaea’s as her shaking hand closed them with only minor resistance from him.
“…that your children may stretch their hands over your body in burial,” Anaea completed the prayer.
The sun’s rising green flash flared at 5:53 am. Buck lay still in the water, and Anaea’s sigh of relief was cut short when he reopened his glowing green eyes.
“Iná l’ọmọ aráyé lè pa kò s’éni tó lè pa èéfín!” Buck said in a voice that startled both women and rumbled through the early morning air. “You can put the fire out but you won’t get rid of the smoke!”
He grabbed immortician Ayodele by the throat then threw her with inhuman strength out of the pool and into a section of the tables and chairs arranged around it. She lay unmoving amidst the upturned furniture. His other hand wrapped around Anaea’s throat. He effortlessly lifted her while he walked out of the pool, glistening water dripping from his nakedness in the rising sun.
“You know what I used to do, girl? I used to raise the dead. I was an immortician, a babalawo of Orunmila for almost a hundred years. I got older and older until I realized I was terrified of dying… so I didn’t. My body just started getting younger, aging backwards.”
Anaea tried everything she could to break free, every move to break an arm, every kick to his body or head but none worked. She began to see spots but could still hear Buck’s booming voice.
“Columbus was pretending to discover America when I was discovering myself and what I could do. Worst thing was when I got thrown in a slave ship heading for the U.S. a lifetime later. Fuck, it wasn’t even the United States back then. I did what I had to do to survive. You’ve got to be cold to live forever. All that love and compassion shit doesn’t work when you hit the middle of your second century and everyone you love is dead, when people only know you as an old man. You forget about your wives, and your kids’re just meat you make and leave behind. I can’t tell you how many of my kids and grandkids I’ve fucked but most of them weren’t as pretty as…”
There was a click behind him as Jack shouted, “You sick fuck!”
Buck didn’t flinch as Jack unloaded six rounds from his Glock pistol into the immortal man’s chest. Buck merely turned around to face Jack, reaching out with his free hand wreathed in green flame.
“None of that shit!” Jack shouted as he fired two bullets through Buck’s head. “I play video games!”
Anaea gasped for breath when she and Buck’s body fell to the wood deck, and she scrambled to Jack’s side.
“What? How?” were the only words she could manage through her bruised throat.
“Detective Bosch called me when she couldn’t reach you.”
“Turned phone… off…”
“Your idiot cousin in South Carolina? Dan? Police found him beaten to death last night. His last call was to you trying to get some of the hospital settlement. They called Bosch. She’s on her way here now.”
“Why… you… here?”
“When do I ever listen to you? I was already coming to make sure you were alright and that son of a bitch died for good this…”
An invisible force bashed in Jack’s nose. Blood spewed all over his shirt and Anaea’s wet white dress. It hit him twice more, lifted him into the air, and threw his body and his gun over the edge of the infinity pool into the deep, wooded gully beyond.
“Jack!”
“Cudn’t… mmmgm… do dat…. gggh… fore I died,” Buck slurred. A bloody scalp flap attached to a chunk of skull swayed as he shambled toward Anaea, the green energy beneath working to heal his gunshot wounds.
Anaea crouched, clenched her fists, and rushed him. Buck smiled crookedly, his brain still rewiring itself, and tried to take a defensive stance. The world heavyweight boxing champion from eighty years ago wasn’t prepared for the swift kick to his exposed testicles that was her specialty. When he hunched over in crippling pain, Anaea pulled his head down and shattered his nose with her rising knee, sending him crashing to the floor. She wanted to snap his neck but something unseen punched her in the stomach then forced her to her knees.
The Buck that approached her was a smiling, bloody mess.
“If I’d known I could do this just by thinking about it, I would’ve died the first time around and let another babalawo bring me back on Halloween. We called this the Season of Souls back then, and an adamant soul reborn in an immortal body? Power from the other side is bleeding through me!”
Anaea struggled helplessly against the invisible grip.
“After I kill you, I’ll go find Vanessa. I’ll have her calling her Papa Buck ‘daddy’.”
“Did you always know?” Anaea asked in a strained whisper.
“What?”
“That you were afraid to die because you were going to burn in Hell?”
Now fully healed, Buck crouched beside Anaea. He wasn’t smiling anymore.