firm in New York, and he just happened to be taking a meeting in Atlanta when Josey yanked the handle. Being nearest partner to big client, he got tagged and came. I lie back in the leather of his rented Town Car and breathe in air-conditioning; I’m back in the bubble wrap of Doe existence, and I find I am a little sorry, as I never quite fit into it. I’m also nervous, because it means I’ll have to talk to my father again.
Finnegan is giving me lawyerly advice, which I interrupt to tell him about Luz. I give him the whole story straight-up. He purses his lips. He is thin lipped, and it distorts the whole bottom shelf of his face to generate a purse equal to my little problem.
“You say this officer, this detective …”
“Detective Paz.”
“Paz. He knows the whole story?”
“Not the part about the mother’s death, no. But he knows something is fishy about Luz. And if he looks hard, he’ll find out who she is.”
“Yes, but there’s no evidence you had anything to do with the woman’s um … accident. She fell and struck her head. You found the girl, patently abused, and took her home, gave her shelter, cared for her. Irregular, of course; you should have notified the authorities, but … we can play it as a Good Samaritan excess. She calls you ‘Mommy,’ does she?”
“Muffa.”
“Hm. Let me get to work on it. I’ll call the governor’s office, see what can be done. Clearly, you’re the best possible adoptive mother with respect to resources for a child; you’re married, which is to the good. Is there any chance …?”
He sees my look.
“Sorry, no, of course not. Still, I think we can get you named guardian while we iron out the details.”
Iron on, Finnegan! It’s so easy to love lawyers when one is rich. We drive to the transmission place and I get my clunker, occasioning another massive lip-purse. I shake hands with Finnegan, thank him. He unloads a last smidgen of advice, to keep my mouth shut and avoid associating with my husband. Poor man, he was all set for a task like bailing a rich bitch out of some DUI-like situation and he ends up with me, voodoo, mass murder, Armageddon, and the Last Days. He hands me a bulky manila envelope and bids me good night.
After the chilled car the night is like a warm washrag against my face. Driving home, I’m aware of the sound of sirens, more sirens than usual, even down here in the poor end of the Grove. I hear a flat explosion, too, somewhere to the north, and closer, the firecracker poppings of small-arms fire. I park and hurry across to Dawn’s.
She’s pale and nervous and she chatters a mile a minute: Jeopardy has been interrupted by the news. The Last Days indeed! Some huge and disparate disaster is occurring. An oil truck has crashed on I-95, gunfights have broken out near the Miami River, a riot is brewing in Overtown, a whole family has leaped from the top of a Brickell apartment house, a squadron of cops has run amok with automatic weapons and shot one another and several civilians. What’s happening, is everyone going crazy? What should she do? Her husband is away again. What should she do?
I suggest a soothing cup of herbal tea, which I make, in her messy kitchen. This served, I greet my child with more fervor than I usually show. She feigns indifference, and continues her play with little Eleanor. Dawn and I sit in wicker chairs and watch the TV for a while. The pundits have decided that it is sabotage and a cult riot, although no one is sure about which cult is involved. Then the screen fizzles and goes dark. We wait, and watch the signature static of the Big Bang for a while, before I thumb the thing off. Dawn gets weepy and I comfort her as best I can.
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 scrawl: 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.
