Then someone in the crowd started clapping, followed by others. People began shouting “Jou’vert!” and “En battaille-là!” Pretty soon there were noisemakers going, and whistles. The Phantom of the Opera shouted, “Glamour! It was just a crew with a glamour!” The band began playing again. The Phantom put his arm around the waist of a chunky, purple-haired woman in a skeleton catsuit, and they careened into the steps of a jig.
Somewhere in the comess, Beti had lost her headpiece. “That was…pretend?” she asked.
Stick narrowed his eyes. “Could be.”
Me, I didn’t business with him and his constant suspicion. My headache was gone and my nose had stopped tingling. Real or make-believe, the Wild Hunt had been the source of the juju weather—not Gladstone, after all. Jubilant, I fumbled for Beti’s hand amongst her rags and patches, and we started dancing to the music again:
We will frighten her half to death, do you hear, my sissie-oh?
We will frighten her half to death, do you hear, my sissie-oh?
Bellowing out the verse, I swung the hoop of my skirt in a circle. It crashed against Gladstone’s leg. My two eyes made four with hers. Hers were rimmed with red, her face blotchy. She narrowed her eyes. Heart thumping, I pushed Beti behind me, but I was too late. Beti squealed, “Gladstone!” She ducked around me and flung herself into Gladstone’s arms.
Blasted child was going to get herself a black eye this Jou’vert afternoon. “Gladstone, wait!” I yelled. I leapt toward the two of them to try to intervene.
Gladstone shoved me away. I landed hard on the ground, heard the balsa wood frame of my skirt crack. “Leave us alone!” she said. She enveloped Beti tenderly in her arms. Beti twined her legs around Gladstone’s middle. The two of them gripped each other’s shirt backs, held each other like they would never let go. They swayed like that for long seconds, to their own music, ignoring the driving beat all around them. My heart cracked open, just like my fragile costume. I stood up.
Gladstone hefted Beti back to her feet. Beti started toward me.
“See, Damy?” she cried out. “It’s all ri—”
Gladstone reached me first, grabbed the front of my blouse, yanked me to her. “It’s been you the whole time, hasn’t it?”
“Wha-at?” I squeaked. We were being buffeted about by revelers. No one to notice the drama going down in their midst.
Beti said, “Gladstone, what are you doing? Come and dance with me.”
But Gladstone only had eyes for me.
“Dowsabelle just got all withdrawn,” she said. “I started fighting more and more with her. Trying to get some reaction from her, I guess. Hated myself. Couldn’t stop. But who’d been whispering warnings in her ear every day, scaring her half to death?”
I drew myself up tall. “You are scary, damn it!” I tried to yank my blouse out of her hand. She held on.
“I got murder-drunk the night Lottie left me,” she continued. “After I came home and found she had moved out. Couldn’t find out for days what had happened. Where did she go, Damiana?”
I squeaked, “You were going to blow any minute. I could feel it.” Daddy Juju had let me put Lottie and her stuff up for a few days in a room above his shop, until she’d found her own place. When the juju weather headaches of Gladstone’s ire had faded, I’d told Lottie it was safe to move.
“And now you’re trying to frighten Beti away.”
“She doesn’t frighten me,” Beti answered. “You don’t frighten me. What’s coming frightens me, but it has to come”—she burst into tears—“and then you and Damiana both will turn your faces from me!”
We turned to her, startled. “Oh, Beti,” said Gladstone, bending and folding her into a hug. “We would never turn away from you.”
We. Did I deserve that “we”? Had I been minimizing the damage Gladstone could do when she was out of control, or had I been causing it?
It happened so quickly. A voice shouted something in a language I didn’t understand. An arm pushed me out of the way and grabbed Beti’s shoulder. A hand peeled Beti away from Gladstone as easily as peeling the skin from a ripe banana. Beti turned, saw who it was, and angrily spat out more words I didn’t understand. A young black man slipped in front of Beti, between her and Gladstone. He tried to shove Gladstone away, but Gladstone held her ground. “Fuck I will,” she said. “Get away from my girlfriend.”
“Go away!” Beti cried out, backing away. But I couldn’t tell whether she was talking to the youth or to Gladstone.
The young man was a sturdy tumpa of a thing, short and muscled and pretty. He wore his jeans and T-shirt as though they were a costume. His eyes were sad, longing. They were Beti’s eyes. He reached for Beti again, same time as Gladstone lurched at him.
Magic smell filled up my nostrils.
“No!” Beti shouted. Quicker than thought, she slapped Gladstone’s hand away from her brother’s. He must be the brother come to take her home, right?
That blow had some serious power behind it. Gladstone grimaced in pain, covered her wrist with her other hand, pulled her hands in close to her chest. “But I love you,” she said to Beti.
Beti slung her arm through the crook that Gladstone’s made. “I know,” she replied sadly, pulling Gladstone away from her brother.
He followed them. Beti stopped, said something to him that sounded like a plea. He snapped angry-sounding words at her, reached for her hand. She pulled it away. She looked scared. Gladstone tried to reach around her. Beti grabbed Gladstone’s sleeve. “No!” she shouted. Little as she was, she was strong. She was holding Gladstone off with one arm and the weight of her body, backing them both away from her brother and arguing with him same time. I started forward.
Stick lifted a warding hand in front of me. “Stay out of this,” he muttered. He called out something in the language that Beti and her brother were speaking. The two of them turned, looking startled.
And then I saw something I never thought I would. Stick bowed the knee to them both.
Gladstone said, “What the hell?”
Stick raised his head and asked Beti and her brother a question.
Beti replied, pointed at her brother and Gladstone.
Her brother cut her off with sharp words.
She responded to him with sad, pleading ones.
He begged, scolded.
Stick stood. He shouted angrily at them both. He gestured at the crowd.
I sneezed, then slapped my hands to either side of my head as an eyeball-melting migraine hit me. Like a friction charge, some deep juju was building up between Beti and her brother.
Stick’s eyes went wide with alarm. He snapped an order, pointed a finger northward, in the direction of the Border. Go, he was saying to Beti and her brother. Go back now.
Beti protested.
Stick turned in a panicked circle. (Stick never panicked!) There were people thronging all around. “Run!” He yelled to the crowd. “Get the fuck out of here!” One or two people started backing away, looking confused, but most didn’t even notice him.
Then the old snake charmer elf was by Stick’s side. Lubin sniffed curiously in the direction of his snake. The snake benignly tasted her air. The Trubie said something to Stick, turned, and began urging people to move away from Beti and her brother.
Stick yelled at Gladstone, “Let her go! Now!”
Gladstone shook her head, swung a protective arm around Beti’s shoulder. Beti shrugged it off.
I saw the hurt on Gladstone’s face, smelled the juju tide come rolling down. Blinding headache or no, I kicked off my shoes and ran toward my friend. “Gladstone, no!”
Beti turned sorrowing eyes on Gladstone, blew her a kiss. “It’s time,” she said.
Beti’s brother reached his hands out. Beti stepped forward and clasped them with both of hers.
Gladstone reached their sides, grabbed his forearm in one hand, Beti’s in the other.
Beti shouted, her voice so large and gonging that it exceeded sound. All the Jou�
�vert action went still with the shock of it.
Beti and her brother exploded into shards of prismed light…
I was still running, still screaming Gladstone’s name, though all around me was only painful brightness and I couldn’t feel my body, couldn’t hear, couldn’t see.
…and coalesced again. Not as a thick-bodied black boy and his sister, but as one faceless something. A something tall as a tree. A something cone-shaped with many-colored tendrils that flared out from it as it spun. A something that made a sound like monsoon winds through the branches of a dead tree. Like the whistle through the air of withies just before they struck bare flesh. But loud, so loud. People fell to their knees, those that weren’t running. Even Stick stepped back.
Not me, for I couldn’t see Gladstone anywhere. I ran right up to the thing. “Beti!” I screamed.
It kept spinning, whistling, clacking.
The old elf ran to stand between it and the crowd. He held up warding hands. The thing began to move away, but one of its flying tendrils whipped across the snake charmer’s face. He convulsed and fell, his snake with him. He was frozen in rigor by the time he hit the ground. Oh god; death had come to Jou’vert for true.
I planted myself in the path of the thing. It came on toward me. “Ti’Bet, stop it!”
It hesitated.
“Where’s Gladstone?” I screamed at it. “What you did to her?”
The thing dithered from side to side in front of me. I howled,
“Bring them back!”
Gladstone, the snake charmer; they couldn’t just be gone.
The tip of the thing leaned its deadly self toward me. I didn’t give a damn. I done dead already, just like Stick said. Whether now or later, who cared? I’d meddled in my friend’s life, and now two sweet beings were gone.
The Beti-thing’s body smelled like dry rot, like carrion. It smelled like Granny’s perfume, like my old dog Glower’s breath, like grief and regret and resignation and goodbye.
And finally, it smelled like peace. It pulled back. It moved away, and there where it had been lay Gladstone, only Gladstone. Her clothes were torn, there was blood coming from her nose, and half her hair had been singed off. I dropped to my knees, felt her neck for a pulse. She was still alive. “Gladstone?” I said. No answer.
“Lemme see to her, sweetness.” It was Screaming Lord Neville, dressed in the tiered plantation gown and madras cotton head wrap of La Diablesse, the devil woman. “I know a few little things,” he said. He folded his long length down to sit beside us. Below the hem of his gown peeked one red sequined pump and one hoof. He saw me staring at it and smoothed the gown over his feet.
The pitchy-patchy thing spun away, in the direction of the Nevernever. People tried to reach the old snake charmer. His snake had coiled itself protectively around his body and wouldn’t let anyone near. Please God I never again hear a snake scream in grief. And I won’t, for it wasn’t a snake. It drew itself up to manheight, howled that terrible howl once more, and became a searing red flame of wings with a dragon mask of loss. In seconds, it and the dead elf were only ash, dissipating on the breeze.
For the next few minutes, as my headache faded, I dithered around Miss Nell. She checked Gladstone for injuries we couldn’t see. Stick brought water. People offered cloaks to keep Gladstone warm and tore costumes into bandages for her. When she opened her eyes, it was like somebody had turned the sun back on.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were coming to hurt her.”
She smiled weakly. “Truth? I might have.” Gently, she touched my chin. “Thank you for keeping me from being an ass even when I’m too stubborn to ask for help.”
“What was she?”
“A rainfly, I think.”
Gladstone had never seen rainflies, but I’d described their life cycle to her. How joyfully they danced in the air before a rainstorm. How when the pounding rain came it drove them to the ground and pulled off their wings. How they wriggled and wriggled and then crawled away, metamorphosed into their adult forms.
Beti had been doing her last dance as a child. She and her brother had needed each other in order to move on to the next stage of their development. No wonder she confused the word for “brother” with the word meaning “two who will become one.”
“So she was really from beyond the Border?” I asked Gladstone.
“Some kind of egungun for true?”
“Some kind of what?” Gladstone was staring longingly in the direction of the forest.
Lord Neville said, “Whatever she was, doux-doux, she knew she couldn’t hide it forever. Brave, proud child. You two did right to care for her.”
He slid his platform shoe off one foot and massaged his toes. He kept the other foot concealed beneath his gown.
•
God in the Sky
An Owomoyela
Three hours after the light flared into the sky, I finally got in touch with Dad. We were frantic, both talking at once: he said “But we don’t know anything yet” while I was saying “There are already theories on the internet;” I said “This isn’t the dark ages, this isn’t an omen” when he started laughing, saying “People are lining up at church already.” That was Tuesday.
Two hours after that, when I’d reached my grandfather, we spoke in similar breathless terms. After he’d invited me to his ranch home, though, just before he hung up, he said words I’d only heard before in pop politics.
Allahu akbar.
•
Seventy minutes on the interstate took me to my grandfather’s. The light in the sky was indistinct—in daylight you could mistake it for a smudge of cloud, except it was too perfectly round and looked farther away than the blue sky. I pulled in on the gravel road, handling my car like the horses my mother loved to ride, and when I got it lined up by his old Chevy he was waiting for me on the wood porch with a grin that went up to his eyes. He was seventy-eight. His salt-and-pepper hair was giving way to salt and his dark face was laced with wrinkles, but he trotted down and opened my door for me. When we hugged, it felt like life took nothing out of him except the fat from his middle age and weight from his step.
“You can help me sort the lentils,” he said.
We both glanced up before we went in.
“Your father called,” my grandfather said, kicking off his sandals to walk barefoot on the red carpet. “He said you called him. What a kick. I think everyone in this family has called everyone else, but no one’s heard a peep from your mother. Have you talked to her?”
“She’s working on an education initiative in Monrovia,” I said. “Their networks went down. I got a really short email this morning to let me know she was alive, but other than that…”
“She’s probably out there, annoyed that she knows we’re worried,” my grandfather said. “She was always too independent for anyone, your mother. That’s why Paul couldn’t hang on to her. Come on.”
We headed into the kitchen to commit what my mother used to call atrocities against American cuisine: pizza topped with lentils and caramelized onions, rice on the side, bottles of peach homebrew pulled out from his fridge, and frozen grapes for dessert.
“I found,” he said, when we’d put the lentils on to simmer and retreated to his patio to watch the empty stable yard, “my old telescope hiding up in the attic, put away with your dad’s old schoolbooks. We should bring it down.”
“We should,” I agreed, though neither of us got up from our conversation until we went back in for our food.
My grandfather talked with his hands. He used to say “If you cut off my hands, I’d go mute!” Today all his gestures tended toward the sky, toward the pale half-dollar sitting opposite the moon. Over pizza, I finally asked.
“Are you converting to Islam?”
That surprised him. I reminded him of what he’d said on the phone, and he laughed. “Oh, that. I don’t know. I was in a state. I don’t know why I said it. I never really thought about converting back.”
; “Back?”
“You didn’t think I was agnostic as a boy in Egypt, did you?” he chided. “I came over here and I decided to be American through and through. First that meant being Christian and owning a business. Then everyone became agnostic and I did too.”
I laughed. “You go with whatever religion’s in vogue?”
He feigned offense. “I’m easily convinced by articulate people.”
“And you’re meeting a lot of articulate Muslims here on the ranch?”
My grandfather gave me an annoyed look. That one wasn’t feigned. “No, of course not. As I said, I was in a state. It was a thing from childhood.” At that, the annoyance faded. “It’s an old man thing, Katri. One day you’ll get old and start reminiscing too.”
He tossed a grape at me. I ducked to catch it in my mouth, but it hit my chin and bounced off. My grandfather hopped to his feet.
“I’m going to pull down that telescope,” he said. “Then you’ll have to stay until the sun goes down.”
“I’ll drink all your beer and have to stay all night,” I told him.
“I’ll convert back to Islam just for you,” he called from the door. “To keep the evils of homebrew out of your hands.” And with that he vanished inside the house, and I was left wondering why the jibe turned sour in my ears.
•
We had to clean both lenses of the telescope, and setting it up took us until the sun was down. The base had to be screwed together, and most of the screws had gone missing. Of course, we found the screwdriver behind his entertainment center around the time the last colors of sunset were fading from the sky—it’d probably been there since he’d put the TV hutch together.
Always a gentleman, my grandfather made me take the first look. Though he also made me look at the light before anything else.
I don’t know what I expected; more powerful telescopes than this had already failed to reveal anything. Through the lens, the object was just diffuse light, like a flashlight shining through paper. I let out a breath and stepped back to let my grandfather see.
Heiresses of Russ 2012 Page 28