the door. The only power the devil’s got is what we give him, all he’s got is power over whatsoever mind that is not turned to the Kingdom, which is you and me, son. And all the other poor sinners out there. The devil can twist your mind into a knot. That’s who we need to look for.”
“Who? The devil? Okay, I figure our perp for around eight foot six, red complexion, wears a little beard, distinguishing marks?horns, tail, little hooves. I’ll get that right out on the wires. He shouldn’t be hard to spot.”
Barlow waggled a finger. “Don’t mock, Jimmy,” he said quietly. “I know you like to, but you can’t do it around this here case. It ain’t good for your health.”
“What’re you saying? Cut to the chase, here.”
“I’m saying look at the facts. A girl killed and cut up, and not just a girl, a girl about to have a baby. The baby’s cut up too. Not just cut up in a crazy way, neither, cut up just so, in a ritual way. Two, she let whoever did it do it without fighting any, that we could see.”
“But she was drugged.”
“There was chemicals in her body, but she didn’t take them through her mouth. They just got there and we don’t know how, and right now we don’t know what they do. For all we know, they might’ve made her wide awake, and she just told him to go ahead.”
“That’s nuts.”
“Uh-huh. To us, but you been in the police long enough to know people do all kinds of awful stuff to themselves and other folks, stuff that seems just fine at the time. Something gets in ‘em, and then later, that’s just what they say. You heard it yourself about four hundred times. I don’t know what got into me.”
“That’s a figure of speech.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t always just a figure of speech. Not back in Bible times, it wasn’t. Our Lord was always casting devils out of folks. And maybe not even now, when you come to think on it. Then we got the other fact, that this fella seems to go where he wants to, and no one sees him, not even dogs. It takes some doing to get past a dog.” He fixed Paz with his eye and said, matter-of-factly, “I guess, when you put that together we’re looking for someone with demonic powers, God help us.”
Paz goggled for a moment and then felt a flash of raw anger. There wasn’t going to a be a brilliant payoff after all. With some force, he said, “Oh, for crying out loud! Look, we have exactly one informant for all this, and he might’ve been half in the bag at the time when. I’ll tell you what the real facts are. We got a perp did a killing, and he dressed it up with all kinds of African hoodoo. Is he wacko? I’ll give you that. Is he some kind of spook with weird mystic powers? No, he’s not. No offense, but that kind of stuff isn’t real, not anymore it isn’t. You want to believe it happened back in Bible times, hey, I respect your beliefs, but this is now, and we’re looking for a regular guy, a regular homicidal maniac, not the spawn of Satan. Talk about something getting into people?what’s got into you? I mean, unless you’re pulling my leg …”
Barlow nodded calmly as Paz rapped this out, and said, “No, I was never more serious in my life.” He sighed heavily and stood up. “Well, we’ll see, won’t we? For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, He taketh the wise in their own craftiness. First Corinthians 3:19.” He patted Paz absently on the arm. “You’ll want to write up your report. Just put in the facts, for now.”
SEVEN
Ido not panic. I go back to Records and finish my day, alphabetical order being such a comfort in periods of tension, and it gives me time to think. Thought before action, not jumping to conclusions: aikido, anthropology, and Olo sorcery are in agreement here. I pause behind cabinet or-osh, get centered, and think. He’s in town, or he’s got a disciple in town, both possible. Who knows what he’s been up to these last years? He could have hundreds, a whole cult. The important thing, does he know where I am? Not likely. New name, low profile, not doing a lot to attract his attention. I’m supposed to be dead, anyway.
The homeboys don’t notice me on the way back to my car. It’s after school and they are being vamped by girls who are more in tune with the times. I get into my stifling junker and think about Margaret Mead, the mother of all us girl anthropologists, and about what she would think of this. Our world is changing so fast that the kids have to figure it all out for themselves, so they reject the parents’ experience as nonrelevant. A very sixties view, Margaret, and explains hippies and hip-hop but doesn’t explain me. I was thirteen when she died, and never met her, but Marcel knew her quite well, thought her a nice lady, good writer, knew zip about culture, depending as she did throughout her career on the honesty of her informants. They all lie, darling, he would say to me, all the informants lie. Wouldn’t you? What would you do if a person in a weird hat and the wrong color skin accosted you on the street and asked you, You like fuckee-fuck, eh, girlee? When you start fuckee? Who you do it with? Old men? Boys? Other girls? How many times? You likee orgasms? You let boy touch-em titties? You like suck-em willie? Would you tell this ridiculous person the truth? You would not. I once actually peed on his foot I was laughing so hard at one of these riffs. Marcel was not a great believer in mere objectivity. Objectivity is the leprosy of anthropology, one of his sayings. French intellectuals are obliged to come up with pithy, witty apothegms, and he was no exception.
The breeze from the car window is somewhat cooler than the waft from a hair dryer on low, but I am not much bothered by this. People who are excessively attached to the creature comforts would be well advised to eschew anthro as a career. The temperature in my car right now approximates the shade temperature inside my bon in Ulune’s compound at Danolo, during nearly the whole of the dry season. My sense memories are returning, I think. I attribute this to the child. Now, for example, I pick up Luz in the cool shade of the patio at Providence and I am nearly overcome by a recollection of being held by my father, on our dock. I must have been about Luz’s age, the age when you can still ride comfortably in an adult’s arms, held easily by one hand under your bottom. It’s low tide, and I can smell the tidal stink around us. We’re at the dinghy basin and we’ve just finished a ride in our tender. My father smells of tobacco, marine varnish, and wood dust.
Luz is carrying a paper sack. When we are in the car she shows me what is in it. It’s a present, she says, it’s for candoos. A great lump of baked Sculpey in the shape of a candleholder, with thick flowers stuck on and all painted primrose yellow with cobalt blue splotches. Nice Ms. Lomax must have pressed the butt of a candle into the soft clay because this part looks quite functional. I appreciate it lavishly. No one has given me anything for some time. We make a special trip down Grand to the rich folks’ Grove to buy a candle to fit in it. We stop at the thrift shop and rummage like the poor people we are and Luz finds a tattered Goodnight Moon, which I gratefully buy for fifty cents.
So we dine by candlelight. I have made a big fruit salad with cottage cheese, which she seems to like, and which helps to cool me down. After dinner, she has to blow out the candle and I have to relight it many times. When I was studying aikido, sensei used to make us douse candles with our fists, to practice speed and control. The point is to compress a column of air in front of your fist and stop your knuckles dead a few millimeters short of the flame. It’s harder than it looks, like everything in aikido. Or sorcery for that matter. Without thinking, to entertain Luz, I snap out my fist and find that I can still do it. More, demands Luz, and I light the wick again and then I recall how her mother died and feel a rush of grinding shame. While I am thus self-absorbed, Luz attempts the trick and slams her little fist into the candle and spills hot wax over her hand and forearm. Wails and a rush to the sink for cooling water. I bring her back into countenance with sleight-of-hand tricks. I take some quarters from a jar where I keep my spare change. I make them walk across my knuckles and I vanish them and produce them from her ears and hair and off my tongue, fingertip productions, toss vanishes, flick vanishes, French drops, and coins- through-table as a finale. I am good at this, I could amaze those even older than four. Marcel always said that legerdemain was the root of sorcery, and one of the field anthropologist’s most valuable tools. It is all about attention, magic. Most of the rest of life is about attention, too.
After the tricks, we lie in my hammock together in our sleeping Tshirts and I read to her, all her books, in the order she likes them, the bird book first, then Bert and Ernie, then the new Goodnight Moon, a great success, three times and she’s out. I had Goodnight Moon, too, and although I suppose my mom must have put me to bed sometimes, I can’t recall being read to by anyone but my father.
Sleep won’t come. There is a gibbous moon and a scent of jasmine. I rock slowly in the hammock. On its uproll the mesh overlays my view of the treetops and the cloud-scudded moonlit sky. Mesh or line, our lives, one of the great questions. I have been shaken by what happened in the office today, the old lady and the dulfana and the
