by Cave, Hugh
Sam. They had met when he went to Haiti, with Vicky, to search out background material for the voodoo book. The town of Jacmel on Haiti's south coast, well off the beaten track, had seemed a likely place to dig into voodoo at that time. It had an intriguing reputation for strange happenings.
Renting a car in Port-au-Prince, he had driven to Jacmel, taken a room at something called the Pension Forban, and discovered he was not the only white man on the premises. Young Sam Norman, doing an A.I.D. job in agriculture, had been living at the same little hotel for months.
Great. An old hand in Haiti, Sam spoke fluent Creole and knew the country as well as any outsider could. He was also having troubles with some local fellow on the dark fringe of voodoo, a bocor named Margal who was giving him fits, and that made it even easier for Will Platt and Sam Norman to become friends in a hurry. When you were prey to such troubles, it was nice to have someone to sit with at the pension's little self-service bar and talk things out.
The trouble with the sorcerer had turned into a strange adventure, but in the end Sam Norman had met a Schweitzer Hospital nurse who was right for him, had married her and gone back to the States. Fine. Every month or so they swapped letters, grateful that in the normal dullness of traveling from birth to death they had run into each other and were able to stay in touch, even without the promise of future meetings.
Then, in March, the phone call came.
"Will? Sam Norman, in Jamaica."
"Jamaica, Sam?"
"The U.N. asked me to look into some obeah trouble a man of theirs was having here. I'm out in the sticks, in Christiana, not in Kingston."
"For God's sake. What do you mean, obeah trouble?"
"Just that. You remember Margal, the bocor who damned near destroyed me?"
"Of course. He and—" Will caught himself. He had been about to say, "He and Vicky were thick as thieves," but suddenly became aware that Vicky was standing only a few feet away, listening to him. "Yes, of course," he finished lamely.
"This is pretty much the same cup of tea, except it's a woman. And there really is trouble, Will. I'm in trouble up to my neck. Can you possibly come down for a few days to lend a hand? I know it's a hell of a thing to ask, but I need you. I really do."
Will had stared at the phone in silence. Actually in something of a daze. He was in the heartland of Florida.
To get to Jamaica he first had to reach an airport from which planes flew there. And what would he tell Vicky? He said at last, "Okay, Sam. When?"
"The sooner the better. Make your arrangements, hey? I'll call you back in a couple of hours to find out when I'm to meet you."
"Meet me where? Montego Bay?"
"Right. It's a shade closer than Kingston. Easier, too."
"Give me your number. I'll call you."
"Will, you can't. I'm at a pay phone."
It was like that sometimes in the islands. You learned to live with it. Rent an expensive house from which the phone had been removed, and you might discover you couldn't get one for months because there were ninety-nine applications ahead of yours. But you might rent a falling-down shack and find it had a phone in it and the damned thing still worked. Crazy.
He turned to Vicky, who was still standing there. "That was Sam Norman, Vicky. I have to go to Jamaica."
"Good. I need a change from this stuffy place."
"I have to go alone."
Her smile vanished. Her eyes glittered. "Alone? Why?"
Because, he thought, this is like the Margal business, and if you go with me and get yourself involved in sorcery again, God knows what might happen. Sam is in trouble with obeah and doesn't need you to make it more dangerous.
But what he said was, "It's a hurry-up thing, no time for planning. I'll be back in a couple of days, no doubt."
"How do you know?"
"Well, I don't know, naturally. A friend is in trouble, you stay as long as he needs you. But it can't be a big deal."
"Oh, of course."
He used the phone to arrange transportation from Miami to Montego Bay, then looked at Vicky again. It was six-thirty on a Saturday evening, and she was dressing for dinner at the club. Wearing only panties and a bra, she stood there as though waiting for him to come and put his arms around her. But he knew that if he did, she would become marble.
He shrugged. It was an old, old story. "Look," he said. "Sam says he needs me. He's a friend. The best friend I have. I'm going down there to see what I can do, and when I've done it or decided I can't do it, I'll come back. What do you care? You haven't needed me since you married me."
"Do you mind telling me where in Jamaica you're going?" she said with the mock politeness that infuriated him.
"Christiana. It's a town in the center of the island, near Mandeville."
"Another Jacmel?" Her eyes were really bright with interest now.
"No," he said, "it's not another Jacmel. Jamaica isn't Haiti."
"What kind of trouble is Sam in?"
"Something about a U.N. man teaching agriculture."
"What do you know about agriculture?"
He had said the wrong thing, he realized. It was a common failing of his when they were engaged in their little battles of wit. He tried to shrug it off. "I'msorry. Sam didn't go into details."
After gazing at him in silence for a few seconds, she shrugged and walked away.
He had taken her to the club that night, and had thought of trying to make love to her when they returned—one last try, because he was leaving for a while —but decided against it. He slept for a few hours, got up, packed a bag with the things he expected to need for a short stay in Jamaica, and departed without even looking into her room to say goodbye.
An hour and twenty minutes after takeoff he was waiting for his bag at the conveyor belt in MoBay, as he had done more than a few times in the past, and feeling the sweat trickle down his ribs under his sport shirt because, of course, the air conditioning was out of order.
Sam Norman was waiting, looking young, rugged, and grateful.
The vehicle in the airport parking area was a Land Rover that belonged, Sam explained, to the United Nations. "I'm living in their fellow's cottage, and he's disappeared. You can stay there too. Lots of room, and he's got the best cook in all Jamaica, I swear. Will, by God, it's good to see you. Shades of Jacmel."
"This is a shade of Jacmel, isn't it?" Will said. "I mean—the same kind of thing you ran into with Margal."
"I think. But this is obeah, not voodoo."
"There's a difference?"
"There is a difference. Anyway, Margal wasn't really voodoo either, was he? We understand that. He was a bocor."
"A sorcerer."
"Right . . . And so, if I'm not mistaken, is the lady I'm up against this time."
They were away from the airport now, Sam driving, the north coast road stretching wide and empty ahead. Will knew this road. It was the one you traveled from MoBay to Ocho Rios, to Port Antonio, past many of the tourist hotels, even on to the capital city of Kingston if you were stupid enough to want to go there. New to him, though, was the road onto which Sam turned just after they had passed through the handsome old seacoast town of Falmouth.
This was a narrow strip of blacktop that snaked through fields of sugarcane at first, and then began to climb. In seemingly endless loops it ascended through a wilderness of deep sinks and formations of limestone that resembled everything from giant animals to whitewashed reproductions of the Hudson River Palisades. "The Cockpit Country," Sam said, interrupting talk of their adventures in Haiti. "Know it, do you?"
Will wagged his head. "Heard of it, that's all."
"It's a geological freak, the only one of its kind in the world."
From the air the terrain probably resembled a huge World War I no man's land, Will decided, its giant shell holes overgrown with forest and scrub. The road skirted the tops of deep depressions, often with uncomfortably steep drops just a few feet beyond the vehicle's tires. Put a collection of chamber pots together, he thou
ght whimsically, and we're a bug running along their rims trying to find a way out of the maze without tumbling to destruction.
"She lives here in the Cockpit," Sam said, breaking a silence.
"Who does?"
"Sister Merle, the obeah woman I've been telling you about. The dame who told our U.N. fellow, Juan Cerrado, she was going to turn him into dirt to make his fields grow better."
"That's what she said?" Will turned on the seat to frown at his companion.
Sam nodded and shrugged at the same time. "The U.N. sent him here to teach the peasant farmers a few new things about farming, just as A.I.D. sent me to Haiti. You remember what happened to me in Jacmel. Margal was grabbing most of what my farmers earned, and I fought him. Cerrado found this obeah woman doing the same thing, and fought her."
They were nearing the village of Wait-a-Bit and Will found himself gazing at steep hillsides bristling with yam sticks. For miles he had been full of admiration for the peasants who farmed this land; they seemed to have planted every inch of earth they could find among the fantastic formations of limestone. Here the soil seemed to be better and more plentiful, though it still would have broken the heart of any farmer in Florida.
"And?" he said.
"As I told you, he's disappeared."
"What do you mean by that, exactly?"
"He's simply vanished, Will. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. Friday before last he went to market with Ima Williams, the cook. Friday and Saturday are market days in Christiana. He wanted to look at the vegetables being offered—it was a thing he did every now and then to help him decide how his program was going. That day he didn't come back."
"Nine days ago."
"Nine days ago, and nobody's seen him. Not a soul."
"What have you done?"
"I went to the police and they're trying to find him—so far without turning up a clue. I've talked to everyone in town who will talk to me. I've driven over every road in the district, stopping at shops and talking to those people. Nobody's seen him."
"And this obeah woman who threatened him—you've spoken to her?"
"Her, too. It was after I'd walked into her place and questioned her that I decided to phone you."
They were making the turn onto the Christiana road, and there had been long silences between fragments of talk because both men were accustomed to thinking before speaking. "Walked to her place?" Will Platt said. "She's that hard to get to?"
"You have to leave your car and follow a footpath. Cockpit Country was a hideout for escaped slaves in the old days, and some of the soldiers who went after them were never heard from again. I had a feeling I might not be heard from again either. Will, how long can you stay with me on this?"
"I didn't bring a time clock."
"Good. Because I like this Juan Cerrado. He's young and pig-headed but really wants to help these people. Has a degree in tropical agriculture and knows what he's doing."
The Land Rover was climbing toward a scarred gray concrete structure with a sign in front that said CHRISTIANA POST OFFICE. "One minute you talk about him in the past tense," Will said. "Then he's alive again."
"That's because he's gone, but I can't believe she's had him killed. All he was doing was threatening part of her income. Probably a small part, at that."
"Just as you threatened Margal's and nearly got yourself killed for it. Is she as powerful as Margal, do you think?"
"She's certainly just as evil."
"For instance."
"Well, there are many stories. I'd better tell you just one at this time. Obeah, of course, is outlawed here. Every now and then someone gets picked up by the police for practicing it and is fined or jailed. About a year ago, I've been told, two cops from Sister Merle's district paid her, a visit one evening in response to some complaints they'd been receiving. It was a hot night and her door was open. Without making their presence known, they looked in and saw her seated at a table with a lighted black candle in front of her. In one hand she held a Bible, in the other a rum bottle. Sound familiar to you, does it?"
"The usual," Will agreed, but sensed something less usual coming.
"After a while she left the house, taking the Bible and bottle with her, and the two cops followed. She went down a Cockpit path to a little graveyard. There she got down on her knees in front of a stone, tapped the stone with the Bible, poured the contents of the bottle over it —and the cops testified in court that it didn't smell like rum —and barked out a command. 'Mordecai, Mordecai, arise!' she shouted. 'Our master calleth! Turn to the north, south, east and west! Come to my house tonight to perform with me the powers of demons! "'
Knowing what he did about bocorism, to which this was certainly related through a common African origin, Will was not even tempted to smile.
"At this point the cops decided they'd heard and seen enough, and showed themselves," Sam Norman went on. "They grabbed the Bible and bottle for evidence and she demanded them back, calling the two men a string of names that should have curled their hair. All this came out at her trial. Another thing that came out was that when she wouldn't shut up and go with them peaceably, one of the cops, a man named Dorney, slapped her across the face pretty hard with his left hand. Keep that in mind, Will; it was his left hand. When he did it, she quit cursing them, stopped resisting, and just stood there staring at his hand. Then suddenly she stepped forward and spat on it."
Sam paused. "Do I need to tell you the rest of this?"
"Tell me anyway."
"The Magistrate found her not guilty, for some reason. She was released and went home. A couple of days later Dorney turned up at a hospital in Mandeville, complaining that his left hand wouldn't stop itching and was driving him crazy. There was nothing wrong with the hand that the medics could see, except that the man had scratched it almost down to the bone."
"And it got worse," Will said, nodding. He had heard a similar tale in Haiti and taken the time to check it out, and had found it to be true.
"It got worse. They kept the fellow in the hospital, and still it got worse. They bandaged the hand so he couldn't continue to scratch it, and still the flesh fell away. Then one day Sister Merle appeared in the doorway of his hospital room, walked over to his bed, looked down at him with what he later described as the most horrible smile he had ever seen, and said to him, 'Does your hand hurt a little, corporal? You're going to lose it, you know. Foolish man, you never should have slapped Sister Merle.' And she walked out."
"Did he lose the hand?"
Without shifting his gaze from the road, Sam nodded. "They had to amputate. For a time they thought he might lose his arm as well."
"Your obeah woman sounds formidable, Sam." Again Sam nodded. "At least we know what we're up against. Shall I take you back to the airport?"
"No way. Keep going."
It was Sunday. The town of Christiana was all but deserted. The four-wheel-drive vehicle droned downhill and up between rows of closed shops. It purred past a silent market gate and a theater displaying gaudy posters advertising Chinese karate flicks.
Another turn on the roller coaster, and it climbed again past a drab shed in front of which mountains of Red Stripe beer boxes were stacked, and a ramshackle garage that looked as though all cars were repaired at the road's edge and had been dripping oil there since Columbus discovered the island.
At last it put commercial things behind and sped between gracefully antique wooden homes with verandas and gardens and fences and gates, until Sam Norman brought it to a halt in front of a gate from which dangled a massive padlock.
"Home."
Unlocking the gate and swinging it open, Sam drove the Land Rover into a curving dirt driveway between hedges of hibiscus and stopped it before a long wooden veranda. A flight of wide steps led to weathered double doors that opened before the vehicle came to a stop. In the doorway a tall black woman, maybe thirty-five years old, held a long-fingered hand above her eyes to shield them from the early afternoon sun so she could see who was
arriving.
"Ima, lend a hand here, will you, please?"
She came down the steps like a peasant woman descending a mountain trail with something heavy on her head—straight as a eucalyptus tree and just as supple. Handsome, Will thought. So many of the country women were handsome.
"Ima, this is Mr. Platt, come to help me find Mr. Juan." This was typical, too: Mr. Juan, not Mr. Cerrado. Soon he would be Mr. Will, not Mr. Platt. "I haven't asked him, but he must be hungry. Could you whip up something?"
"Of course." She looked at Will in an appraising way. They were good at that, especially with white men. "Do you like our food, Mr. Platt?"
"What did you have for your lunch?"
"Stew-peas, sir."
A dish made with red beans or gungo peas, pigtail, maybe some chicken. "Is there any left?" They always cooked a lot of stew-peas; it took so long with spices and extras to achieve the proper flavor.
"Oh yes, sir, plenty."
"Then I'd like some. Indeed I would."
Her smile was wary but revealed beautifully white teeth—a rarity among peasants, who usually lost everything to yank-out country dentists before they reached her age. Lifting his suitcase from the Land Rover, she swept inside with it while he looked at Sam and approvingly nodded.
"She's the best," Sam said.
"Lucky you."
"Not me. Juan. To be candid, I think he was sleeping with her before I got here, and I don't blame him."
After Will had eaten his fill, the two men went into the parlor where Sam filled glasses with a light, smooth Venezuelan rum. As they sat and relaxed with their drinks, Will looked at his friend's troubled face, and knew this would probably be their last quiet moment. "All right, Sam, what do we do?"
"As I told you, he disappeared a week ago Friday when he went with Ima to market. You don't know Christiana, but it's like—well, even Jacmel—on market day. People come in from miles around, not on foot like in Haiti, but by bus and community taxi. You know the sort of taxi I mean: so much for the ride, and pack 'em in till they're sitting on one another's shoulders."
Sam paused to sip his drink. "Anyway, the market is a mob scene. You walk down from the street through five or six different levels until you come out at the bottom." He paused again, and shrugged. "Juan went with her to see what the higglers were selling, and when she looked for him to drive her back, she couldn't find him. She walked home and told me. I went up and searched the whole damned town for him, couldn't find him either, and brought the Rover back."