by David Payne
And now he came to an unmarked fork. “Two roads diverged…Hmm…” Ransom stroked his chin. “You don’t think you’re going to throw me with that lame trick, do you?” Shouting this, he pumped his fist at God, the Nemesis, whoever his unnamed interlocutor might be, then took the road-less-traveled-by and promptly came to a locked fence.
Only then, as he stopped and took brief stock, did Ran notice the stillness of the wood, the oppressive heat. It was like the sensual embrace of some inhuman force too old and powerful to defeat. Nature—the idea struck home in a flash.
“But, hey, goddamn it, aren’t I Nature, too?” asked Ransom, with a plaintive note. How had he forgotten this? “So what is this against?”
In the trees nearby, a bird he couldn’t see answered with a loud ca-raw. Wingbeats filled the air, like the sound of a soft helicopter prop, and as they faded, a brooding strangeness descended over everything. Staring up through foliage, he saw turkey vultures—there were three—in sky so blue it made Ran’s heart ache with longing for…what? eternity?
“What the hell are those things tracking?” he muttered. Then the idea struck. “Jesus! Me? Am I alive or not?” He took a beat. The question was not so obvious as it had once seemed. “I better be,” he said. “I better not be lying back there dead under that tree. This better not be some Ambrose Bierce, ‘Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’–type stunt. It fucking better not.” He cast a frowning eye aloft on this.
He did feel a little strange, though, and when you got right down to the brass tacks, Ran wasn’t one-hundred-percent convinced he was alive, or even clear on how you tell. And once you lose that basic certainty…well, folks, to coin a phrase, it’s hard to put the egg back in that shell. But maybe he was treading on a higher plane—was this what the Buddhists meant? “Oh, what the fuck,” he said, losing patience with this train, “you have to go on the assumption, right?”
Following his own advice, he ignored the Keep Out sign and climbed the fence, and before too long at all he heard music in the distance: drums. In a junkyard on the left, an old panel station wagon had been abandoned, perhaps the very one the radical founders of Alafia had traveled south from Philly in, wheelless now and rusted out, covered with African graffiti. There were broken farm tools, busted-up appliances, shop jacks, and littered ax-and hammerheads. From a live oak limb, a monster block and tackle hung, trailing heavy chain. And in the midst of this, what made the place seem less a junkyard than a shrine, an enormous iron man, a king of iron surrounded by his iron swag. His head was made from a toothed gear that must have weighed three hundred pounds, and his iron shoes were covered with feathers, smeared and glued like the hatchet block in a farmhouse abattoir. His rusted pitchfork hand was raised forbiddingly.
“I come in peace,” said Ran, choosing to take the gesture as a welcome. He bowed low to the ground, and when he straightened up, there was a peacock in the tree, regarding him, a calm, impressive presence, and the sunlight touched its feathers, flowing down its wings and back like melted jewels, like a tumbling blue-green mountain stream.
Ca-raw, it said, and then it flew off down the white sand road—ca-raw, again. It disappeared around a bend, and at that very moment, from the opposite direction, an old-style VW van came barreling toward him, its toylike engine whining like something that derived its motive power from tightened rubber bands.
It stopped beside him. The driver, a woman, stared out and blinked. Ran blinked, staring in.
At first take, Ran’s surmise that he was dead was further reinforced. The driver was Delores Mills, or rather, her unaged body double and dead ringer in a bitambala headscarf, black with a large gold sunflower, and dangle earrings.
“Shanté?” he said, taking a gander.
“Ransom?”
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for you,” she answered. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for you.”
“What the hell happened to you?”
He touched his cheek. “This? Had a little crash. Fell asleep at the wheel…Story of my life.”
“Are you all right?”
He shrugged. “Either fine or dead—haven’t reached a verdict yet.” He grinned, but she, looking more than ever like her mom, was in no mood for comedy. “Why were you looking for me anyway?” he asked.
“Because your wife called here, frantic, at midnight and said you’d disappeared and they couldn’t think where else you might be. Why are you here?”
Ran blinked. “Now that you mention it, I have no freaking clue. I was driving. I saw the sign for Beaufort. I remembered Cell saying you lived nearby. A little birdie whispered: ‘Go see Shanté.’”
“A little birdie…”
“Well, I don’t mean a literal bird, of course.”
“What do you mean?” Shanté was clearly in a literal mood.
“I mean, something said go pay you a visit, and here I am. Don’t look at me like I have the lampshade on my head. Don’t you ever have impulses and give in to them?”
Giving him a severely doubtful look over glasses that were themselves severe—small, square, and hip, with inner rims of limpid gold—she nodded to the shotgun seat and said, “Get in.”
With this terse remark, she executed a three-point reverse, and her wrap—in the same pattern as her headscarf—slipped, showing the black Lycra rim of biking shorts that hugged unfashionably stout but sturdy thighs that flexed impressively as she pressed the clutch with one bare, dusty foot, and, with the other foot, the gas. Her toenails, Ransom noted, were painted a pale shade of pink.
“Damn, Shan,” he said. “It’s great to see you. You look good. I swear to God, though, when you pulled up—and don’t take this wrong, I mean it as a compliment—I thought you were your mom.”
“How else would I take it, Ran? I say hello to her in the mirror every morning when I wake up. I’m no spring chicken anymore. Neither are you.”
He gave her the opportunity, but she didn’t bite. “I look okay, though, right?”
“Actually, you look like shit…. Hammered dogshit in the vague shape of a man.”
He shook his head and grinned. “You haven’t lost those winning ways…. So what exactly did Claire tell you?”
“An earful. None good.”
“Oh.” Fleeting contact with reality put a minor crimp in Ransom’s mood, and he sat back like the reprimanded student on the corner stool.
The village, from without, resembled a frontier fort, walled with sharpened palings sheathed in bark. Over the gate, a banner proclaimed, “Harvest Festival Today, Visitors Welcome.” Shanté parked in a dusty lot where pickup trucks and farm machines sat cheek by jowl with Mercedeses and Lexuses with license plates from Cobb and DeKalb counties, Georgia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.
“So what exactly are you harvesting?” Ran asked.
“Ground nuts.” Shanté nodded to a field they passed as they walked in.
Ran squinted at the knee-high foliage. “Soybeans?”
“Peanuts.”
“A goober fest!”
She smiled with narrowed eyes. “You showed up right on time. Wait here.”
Crossing the courtyard to confer with several colleagues, she left him by the gate. In the shade of a thatch-roofed building, men were drumming, while others danced—a few. More watched or simply milled, ducking into dimly lit temples, where candlelight flickered on lavish altars where gifts of fruit and flowers had been placed. Presiding over one was an iconic man of sculpted ebony, brandishing a two-sided ax; in another, a bare-breasted black Madonna, holding in one hand a dove, in the other, a human heart. Towering above a concrete basin the size of a home swimming pool, though just six inches deep, was a dark-faced Neptune with a trident and a crown. Dripping down his washboard superhero torso, the water, cycling back, set the scales agleam on his blue-green merman tail. He might have been transported from a miniature golf pavilion in Myrtle Beach, thought Ran, wondering where the hell he was, and liking it.
“
Who’s King Neptune?” he asked Shanté when she returned.
“His name is Olokun. Come on.”
In the crowd, as they passed through, Ran saw the occasional fela or dashiki. Many more, though, looked like moms and dads out for a Sunday stroll in chinos and Lands End sweater sets. Ran’s was not by any means the sole white face. A rangy kid slouched by with matted dreads stuffed into a tricolored Rasta hat, and there—conferring, bleary-eyed, over a map—were the inevitable Scandinavian students with backpacks, leather clogs, and mussy, slept-on white blond hair.
A relaxed and festive atmosphere prevailed. There were people eating Ethiopian bread and Southern barbecue, salt peanuts in the shell. The scene, Ran thought, was like a street fair, the San Gennaro in New York, or some blue September Sunday in Montmartre, toiling up the hill behind the crowds to Sacré Coeur. It was, in a way, unlike any place he’d ever been, and in another, pretty much like anywhere.
Shanté led him off the beaten path and down a narrow street of shops, all of identical Third World shotgun-shack construction, dirt-floored, with whitewashed plywood hatches propped open to provide awnings over narrow countertops where there was business being done. The necessities were in evidence: cooking oil and kerosene in reused plastic jugs, shrimp and fish on beds of ice, fresh produce and eggs—not just white and brown, but speckled ones and pale blue, too, from Araucana hens—in recycled cardboard crates.
Ran caught a complex smell, sweet like perfume, with astringent notes as well. There were hints of camphor, roses, pepper, wine, Thai lemongrass, and wintergreen, and then he saw the stall: “Crossroads Spiritual Supply and Curio.” On the back wall, on shelves of cinder block and pine, were stoppered vials of many shapes and sizes. In different-colored oils—golds, merlots, muddy browns, and fiery orange like Tabasco—were various grasses, seeds, and roots, some of which resembled human body parts.
Shanté started lowering the hatch.
“This is your place?”
She nodded. “I’m going to take you to the house, and then I have to get right back.”
“So what is all this stuff—vodou supplies?”
“It has nothing to do with vodou.”
Ran waited, but clearly he was going to have to ask. “So what is it?”
“It’s hoodoo, for the most part.”
He blinked. “So, hoodoo and vodou—these are different?”
“Very.” Terse and in no mood to educate her former flame, she conducted him ever deeper into the village, between the canted walls of compounds where Ran heard radios tuned to NPR—the BBC World News. There were TVs blaring, mothers scolding kids. In a sun-baked square, boys were playing stickball. They passed an open gate, where a handsome twenty-something man in a white wrap with blue birds on the wing was speaking on a cell. Behind him in the yard, his wife (Ran assumed she was his wife) was hanging batiked cloth on a line as the wind bloused into it. Laughing at something in his conversation, he caught Ran’s gaze and smiled with twinkling, good-natured eyes before he softly closed the gate, and Ran walked on, feeling touched by grace.
Shanté’s house was cinder block with a tin roof and a swept dirt yard dominated by an enormous tree with a broad, flat crown and a buttressed trunk.
Inside, her clean, spare room smelled like her shop. One whole side was dominated by a plywood worktable, where she clearly made her preparations. There was a bed, a dorm-sized fridge, a bookshelf, a stove, a dining table, and two chairs. There was a small shrine, too, with several stemmed glasses filled with water, a crucifix, a bowl of white carnations, a King James Bible opened to the Psalms. There were numerous photos there, including one of Delores, before which a votive burned.
“All right, listen,” she said, in a martial tone that Ran, despite his problem with authority, really didn’t mind. “Let’s get that cut cleaned up, and then I have to go. This is one of the biggest days in my whole year.” She handed him a phone. “Call your wife.”
Ran took the receiver dutifully, then stood, paralyzed. “I don’t think I can talk to Claire right now.”
She regarded him, arms akimbo. “Why not?”
“We’re sort of going through a patch, Shanté.”
“A patch…What kind of patch? A bad patch? A briar patch? What?”
He shrugged and looked away. “Could you just do me a favor and let her know?”
“What’s going on here, Ran?”
“I’d tell you if I knew.”
“Why don’t you know?” she persevered. “If you don’t know, who knows?”
“Look, don’t give me the third degree,” he said, “okay? What did Claire tell you anyway?”
“Where do I start?” She shoved a chair at him and fetched some swabs and alcohol. “That you’re manic…” A trifle brusque, she started to debride the cut. “That you’re off your meds. That yesterday you kidnapped your children, assaulted a stranger in Charleston on the street, and now you’re on the run from the police. What else? No, that was pretty much the gist. Of course, she didn’t know about your wreck.”
“Tune in to America’s Most Wanted,” Ransom said. “They’re featuring me this week.”
She pulled away to look. “You think this is funny?”
“No,” he said, “but it’s a little funny, though. I mean, come on, Shan, there’s a fair amount of spin on all of that.”
“I’ve known Claire a long time, Ransom,” she replied. “I’m pretty good at compensating for her spin.”
“Look,” he said, “I admit I let my medication slide a bit, but I took it yesterday. I’m getting back on track, and it isn’t like I’m crazy….” He floated this, but she just frowned and let him stew. “I don’t seem crazy, do I?”
“I’m making up my mind.”
Ransom was the first to blink. “Damn, you remind me of your mom!”
“Say it one more time, you’re going to get one in the arm.”
“A noogie?” Ransom asked. “Look, you almost smiled—I saw that!”
“Here.” She handed him the swab.
“So, enough about me,” he said. “Cell said there was some guy?” He glanced toward the bed—single, tightly made as though for camp.
“Simon. That’s been over for two years. We split up when I left Zaire.”
“You were in Zaire?”
“For four and a half years.”
She kept her eyes fixed on his forehead, and Ransom felt the distance loom. “I guess I haven’t been too great at keeping in touch.”
Acknowledging the understatement, she let her gaze drop to his face.
“What were you doing over there?”
“I was in a kinkimba.”
“What’s that?”
“A school where they teach kinganga.”
“What’s kinganga?”
“A science.”
“What kind of science?”
“The science of how to be a human being,” she replied, “how to live a human life.”
Ransom blinked. “Damn, I could use a course in that! So you studied for the priesthood?”
“Actually, I was a cook. That’s the only way they let a woman in. Eventually, I learned the traditional practice.”
“Meaning, vodou…excuse me! Hoodoo?”
“No. Hoodoo is what traditional Congo practice turned into in the U.S., when slaves brought it here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was called Conjure then. Vodou is something else—not Congo, Ran, but Fon, okay?”
“What’s Fon?”
“The Fon,” she said, with modest heat, “are a tribe from West Africa. They went to Haiti and developed vodou, or vodun. Santeria or Ocha is from the Yoruba, another tribe from a different part of West Africa. Olokun—the one you asked about outside?—he’s the Yoruba god of the sea. Most of the people in Alafia follow Yoruba traditions. Me, I’m Congo.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because when I went over there with Simon, in the little villages near Tsheila and Isangila, among his people, the BaManianga, half the pe
ople on the streets looked like my aunts and uncles.”
“Sort of like the little birdie?”
“Okay, Ran. Okay. Touché.”
“They’re all related, though, right, these religions?”
“Sure,” she said. “As Southern Baptists are related to Swedish Lutherans are related to the Church of Rome.”
“They can all tell you what happened on the cross, though, right?”
She conceded him a grudging smile. “They can all tell you what happened on the cross. At that level of generality, they’re related.”
“So, nobody since Simon?”
“I’m celibate,” she said.
“Celibate?” This came out sharper than he meant. “Why?”
“Religious reasons.”
“Meaning…”
“Meaning, none of your business…Now, look, I won’t be gone long. Why don’t you shower, fix something to eat, and lie down.”
“Hey, Shan…”
“What?”
“I was sorry about your mom.”
She softened a bit. “Yeah, I know, Ran. Thanks.”
“You know I dreamed of her last night?” Leaning toward Dolores’s photo, Ran noticed, hanging on her crucifix, on a fine gold chain, a Saint Christopher no larger than a dime. “Hey”—he lifted it—“hey, is this…?”
Shanté smiled a quick, bold smile that brought things back. “You gave me that, didn’t you?”
“What, you forgot?”
“No, I remember. Do you?”
“Are you kidding? Hell, yes, I remember. Hale, yeah!”
His Killdeer accent finally made her laugh.
“That thing cost me four Saturdays scrubbing down the head at Dixie Bag,” he said. “Know where I bought it? Alston-Heller.”
“That was a pretty tony place.”
“Damn straight,” said Ran. “That’s where all the rich kids got their sterling baby cups and pinkie signet rings. When I came in the door, the alarm went off automatically. Armed guards in camouflage rappelled down from the roof on ropes. I shit you not. They searched my body cavities three times before they let me pass.”