Midnight Robber

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Tan-Tan, don’t make mako ’pon me, I not going let it confuse me. You frighten of Antonio and Janisette and you frighten to leave. I could see it, I know you too good.”

  Tan-Tan could only stare at him.

  “You want me to tell them for you?”

  “No! Don’t say nothing!”

  “I serious, girl. Then me and Daddy could help you get ready, if your family not going to do it.” His look softened in a way she’d never seen before on Melonhead’s jovial, easy-going face. He said awkwardly, “I, ahm . . . Nanny hear me, Tan-Tan; I would do anything for you.”

  “What?” The first “huh” of a laugh fell from her lips. Then she looked into his eyes, felt wonder rearrange her features. “What?” she breathed, scared to death of the answer.

  He looked embarrassed, backed away a little. “Look, never mind. I go come back later, all right?” With hurried, awkward steps he started away.

  “Stay, Melonhead.” He stopped, kept his back to her, looked down at the ground.

  “Is what you saying?” Tan-Tan asked.

  He returned slowly, still not looking at her. “You go laugh.”

  “I ever laugh after you yet? Tell me.”

  “I . . . so long I want to tell you, to ask you . . .” He took her hand, Melonhead took her hand, played nervously with one of the beads of her bracelet. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You think you might ever want to partner with me?”

  “Me?” The sound could have been a sob. She pulled her hand away from him. “Why you want me?”

  “You and me does walk good together, talk good together. Me nah want that for stop, ever. You don’t like me, Tan-Tan?”

  This was not her friend Melonhead, this was a new creature standing in front of her. “I never think—”

  He rushed to cut her words off: “I know we never talk about it before, I know you got plenty next boyfriend, I know my face favour jackass a-peep through tear knickers . . .”

  A giggle bubbled to Tan-Tan’s lips. “Don’t say so! You not ugly!”

  Melonhead’s eyes searched her face. He smiled uncertainly. And waited. He always knew when to wait, just let her talk, or think. This wasn’t a new Melonhead, she was just seeing him differently. He had always looked out for her. He cared for her. Who could care for mud in the street, whispered bad silent Tan-Tan, but for the first time in years the voice didn’t wound, didn’t matter. “When we would do it?” she dared to ask quietly.

  Hope made Melonhead incandescent. “The ritual? Before we leave, so everybody could come.”

  “No. Not here. In a new place, with new people. Please, Melonhead, not here. When we settle in Sweet Pone we could send for your father to come and have it with him there. In we own house.” We own house; was it her saying those words?

  He smiled. “All right, if is so you want it.”

  “And what about . . .”

  He was suddenly cheerful. “All the thousand and one boyfriend-them, you mean? We could be freehand partners, sweetness.” He looked away shyly, her too, startled by the endearment.

  Such a simple solution. He didn’t scorn her, didn’t call her names, wouldn’t punish her. Bad silent Tan-Tan made unhappy sounds. She would consider that later. Gravely she said to Melonhead, “Let we do it.” She could scarcely breathe for joy. Melonhead stepped closer to her, his hands warm on her knees. His breath smelled of cloves and sweetleaf. She leaned forward to touch her lips to his.

  Crash! Shards of glass showered down over her and Melonhead. Jumping up, she saw Antonio holding a broken-off rum bottle neck in his hand. Antonio jabbed at Melonhead who leapt back.

  “Mothercunt thiefing son of a bitch!” Antonio bellowed. “What you chatting she up for? Eh?” He staggered forward, tried to leap the banister. He slipped and caught himself, his bare feet sliding in the broken glass. So drunk he didn’t even self notice his sliced, bleeding feet. “You want I tear up that pretty face for you? You ain’t business with my daughter!”

  Melonhead pulled himself up tall, his face cold. “Your daughter old enough to do what she please, man.”

  Antonio’s face clotted with fury. “You facety . . . !” Antonio made to rush down the porch stairs.

  “No, Daddy!” Tan-Tan put her hands out to stop him. He clouted her over her ear, the one where her implant had been. Pain exploded behind her eyes, but she managed to stay upright. She held on to her father’s waist, kept him on the stairs from sheer force of desperation. “Melonhead! Go home!”

  “I not leaving you!”

  “She not going anywhere with you, you pissant wretch!”

  “Go, Melonhead, or it just go be worse!”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes! I go come talk to you later.”

  Melonhead took an unsure step away, waiting to see what would happen. Antonio quieted, stood weaving on the stairs and mumbling incoherent curses at Melonhead.

  “Tan-Tan,” Melonhead called, “I go give it a hour for you and he to talk. Then I coming back with Daddy and the sheriff and we taking you from here.”

  Oh, please Nanny, yes. “Go, I say!”

  He walked away backwards, slowly, keeping a stern eye on Antonio. Antonio found some energy and threw the bottle top at him. Melonhead ducked clear, turned and jogged down the lane.

  “Come Daddy, make I clean up your feet.”

  Antonio grabbed her arm, so tight she felt the skin bruise same time. “Rutting whore!” He backhanded her across the face. She felt her teeth meet in her tongue.

  “No, Daddy!”

  “Every time I turn my back, you making time with some man! Like you turn big woman now? Eh? You smelling yourself?”

  “No, Daddy! Please, Daddy! It ain’t go happen again!”

  But Antonio dragged her into the living room. All Tan-Tan pulled she couldn’t break his grip.

  “Blasted slut with a slut for a mother. You ain’t too big for me to tan your behind for you!” With one hand, Antonio unbuckled his heavy leather belt and pulled it out from his pants. He doubled it up in his hand and cracked it against her shins. The pain was like a knife cut.

  “Daddy!” she shrieked.

  He beat her across her calves, her thighs. She could feel the welts rising. She screamed, but Melonhead was too far away to hear.

  As he whipped her Antonio was dragging her by the arm through the house, into her bedroom. He threw her on the bed.

  “Is man you want? Is man? I go show you what man could do for you!”

  No. No. She couldn’t face this again, after years free from it. He kicked her legs apart, yanked up her skirt, tore her underwear off. He pushed into her. She bawled out for the tearing pain between her legs. He grunted, “I is man too, you know! Is this you want! Is this?”

  Something was scraping at her waist. Her hand found it. The scabbard. With the knife inside. A roaring started up in her ears. It couldn’t have been she. It must have been the Robber Queen who pulled out the knife. Antonio raised up to shove into the person on the bed again. It must have been the Robber Queen, the outlaw woman, who quick like a snake got the knife braced at her breastbone just as Antonio slammed his heavy body right onto the blade.

  “Uhh!” Antonio jerked like a fish on a hook. He collapsed onto her. His weight drove the knife handle backwards against her breastbone, gouging upwards until it was under her chin. Antonio’s head fell on Tan-Tan’s own. She screamed. His body convulsed, then relaxed. Thick blood gushed out of his mouth. She heard his bowels loose in death. Then she smelt it.

  Her body went cold. She started to tremble uncontrollably. She lay there so under Antonio’s corpse, waiting for Melonhead to come and end the nightmare.

  And is there so Chichibud found her. He sniffed the air before he entered the room. “Dead,” he said.

  Tan-Tan felt the hysteria bubbling up. “Off me. Get. He. Off. Me.”

  Chichibud hopped up onto the bed and dragged Antonio’s body to one side. Tan-Tan couldn’t stop trembling. She couldn’t even self manage to pull her
skirt back down over her legs. Is Chichibud who did it for her. A low moaning was coming from her mouth. “Sh, sh, doux-doux. I could read the signs for myself. I know he attack you.”

  She found the words. “He did beating me.” She swallowed. Her chest burned where the knife handle had gouged a track, pushed by Daddy’s body. “Beating me bad, with he leather belt. Then he . . . I never mean to use the knife, Chichibud. I did only want he to stop hurting me. Oh God, Daddy dead?”

  “Dead, yes. We have to leave, fast.”

  “No, Melonhead coming back with One-Eye.”

  “Then we must move now. One-Eye rules don’t have no mercy. Murder will swing you from the hanging tree.”

  “Me?” She couldn’t believe it.

  “You, yes. Pack.” He sent her over to her dresser drawers while he wrapped up Antonio’s body in the bedclothes. She did nothing, couldn’t seem to think, just watched him. He wiped her new hunting knife clean against the bedsheets and handed it back to her.

  “No, no, Chichibud! Don’t make me touch it! Throw it away!”

  “Don’t fret, Tan-Tan, don’t fret.” He sheathed the knife at his own waist.

  He tore off a strip of the bedsheet, wiped the blood off Tan-Tan’s face. He indicated the gouge in her breastbone from the knife handle. “I go bandage it later.” He opened her dresser drawers himself, yanked clothes out of them at random.

  She had killed Daddy.

  Somehow she struggled into the clean blouse that Chichibud gave her. Her hands were shaking so badly she could only do up three of the buttons. Chichibud held out another garment. Her new skirt, the birthday skirt that Chichibud’s wife had made for her. She pulled it on under the skirt she’d been wearing, tore the top skirt off her body and let it fall. Her eyes kept straying back to the bloodstained lump on the bed, wrapped in her sheet. The smell of death was thick in the air. She just kill she own daddy.

  Chichibud bundled her out of the house, talking soothingly to her the whole time. “Nothing wrong, is just you and me, going for a walk like we always do. Good thing Benta come with me today. We could ride she.” They went out front to the guava tree. Benta, his big, stout packbird, was crouching on the ground, large as a cow and as solid, but with green and brown feathers. She was plucking leaves off the water vine that was entwined around the wormy guava tree and sucking them down. She had a leather panier strapped to her back between her stubby wings-them and her neck, and a high leather seat buckled round her body.

  When Benta spied Chichibud she got to her feet, bating her useless wings and cawing.

  “Hush up, the child in trouble! Can’t make everybody know we business.”

  “Wroow,” Benta said. She butted her head gently against Tan-Tan’s shoulder in her customary greeting. She nuzzled against Tan-Tan’s neck and combed the girl’s untidy plaits through her beak. On another day it would have made Tan-Tan smile; Benta bird was forever trying to groom her hair. Today she stood beside Benta and shook. Daddy dead. Somebody kill he. Somebody bad.

  “Down, Benta girl,” said Chichibud. The bird crouched low. “Tan-Tan, get in the panier.”

  She could do that. She could follow an order. Benta bent her neck and Tan-Tan climbed into the panier, knees pulled up in front of her nose. Her body hurt. She waited for whatever it would please Chichibud to do next. He climbed into the seat behind her. He threaded a leather strap between one handle of the panier and the other, tied it. “Hold on to this when the ride get rough,” he told her. “And keep your head low.”

  It smelt clean inside the panier, like wood shavings. She heard Chichibud buckling his own seat straps.

  “Hold on, pickney. Go, Benta. Straight to the bush.” The bird stood up, shook her wings into place, and took off at a run. She pelted round the back of the house, using her wings for balance whenever she swerved. Tan-Tan closed her eyes. The bumpy, jolting ride in the confined dark . . . a memory nearly a decade old rose in Tan-Tan’s mind, of crashing round in the trunk of the sheriffs’ car while it drove her and Daddy to exile. Daddy . . .

  Soon the sound of Benta’s feet hitting the ground changed from a thud to the crackle-bounce of corn trash. Tan-Tan opened her eyes. They were in the fields around Junjuh, fleeing fast in the dusk towards the bush.

  They broke into the bush proper, to the cover of the trees. When the first young branch scored the side of her face, Tan-Tan crouched down inside the panier. More withies slapped whup-whup against the panier. Tan-Tan didn’t know how Chichibud was protecting himself from them. But Benta slowed only slightly, trampling what she could and avoiding what she couldn’t. The roaring in Tan-Tan’s head hadn’t stopped since she’d impaled Antonio on her knife. Bad Tan-Tan was screaming silently: Antonio dead, he dead. Antonio dead. You kill he.

  After some time, Chichibud called for Benta to stop. Tan-Tan heard him sniffing the air.

  “Them coming for we, Tan-Tan. Bringing the dogs.”

  The dogs! The dogs that had made it to Toussaint had all interbred into one tough, bad-tempered mongrel strain. They would track a scent till Kingdom Come. Tan-Tan had seen animals that the Junjuh pack had torn apart. It was too much to deal with. Dumbly, she twisted back to look at Chichibud.

  He said, “Benta, is up to you. The dogs must lose we scent. Tan-Tan, you strap in good? Hold on tight.”

  “Wroow,” Benta cooed. She hopped over to the nearest big tree and dug one set of powerful claws into its trunk. Even in the reddish dusk Tan-Tan could see the tips of Benta’s claws sinking into the wood. The bird reached up and dug her beak into the trunk a little higher. And to Tan-Tan’s amazement, Benta started to climb. She sidled up foot by foot, using her beak to pull her up higher into the tree, up into the branches where the leaves could hide them and the dogs would lose their scent in the air.

  Chichibud laughed a low shu-shu. “Oonuh tallpeople don’t really know what packbirds could do, oui?”

  Tan-Tan held on to the sides of the panier till her fingers cramped around it. “You should leave me, make them find me.”

  “For that mad sheriff to hang? You was only trying to defend yourself.”

  “One-Eye would be right to hang me. I k-kill Daddy.”

  “Papa Bois see what really happen in that room, Tan-Tan. He ain’t judging you.”

  Benta had reached a thick limb high up in the tree. Before Tan-Tan knew what was happening Benta was leaping to a next tree, flapping her useless wings as she went. Tan-Tan gave a little scream.

  “Hush. Don’t make the dogs hear we.”

  Benta landed sure-footed in the next tree and kept climbing. And now Tan-Tan could hear the pack of dogs baying, following their scent and the clear trail Benta’s tracks must have made. The dogs were crashing through the undergrowth, with the men shouting behind them: “Here! This way!” Lights from hurricane lamps were dancing through the bush like duppy lights in the dark.

  Benta froze.

  Tan-Tan held still like the last breath between life and death. She didn’t even dare look down. The dogs were whining and running around, looking for the scent they’d lost. One-Eye’s voice said, “Is what the blast wrong with allyou bitch hound? Find them, I say!”

  The men laid about the dogs-them with whips. The dogs yelped. But they’d lost the scent and there was no more trail.

  “Let we go home,” said a voice. It was Melonhead. Tan-Tan managed to stop her cry before it had left her lips. She sat in the dark with Chichibud and Benta, knuckling hot tears and grit flies from her eyes.

  The lights and the sound of the hunting party were gone. Chichibud made a chittering noise with his claws. Tan-Tan knew that sound; he was worried. “I think is time,” he said to himself. “We know say it would happen.” Benta gave a low, grumbly series of warbles that made Tan-Tan think of nannysong. But they were only nonsense phrasings. Benta started climbing again, higher and higher up the tree till the stars were visible through the branches. She kept climbing, testing her weight on smaller and smaller branches. Tan-Tan was queasy from the sway
ing of the climb. Would the branch hold? She looked out over the bush. She could just make out one-one light twinkling back in Junjuh Town: the hurricane lamps people hung outside their front doors every night. The darkness was a thick blanket round her, like the blanket in the trunk of the autocar when she’d run away with . . . Chichibud’s voice was barely a whisper when he said:

  “Oonuh tallpeople been coming to we land from since, and we been keeping weselves separate from you. Even though we sharing the same soil, same water, same air. Tonight, that go change, Tan-Tan. I taking you far away, where Junjuh Town people can’t find you. For me to do that, you go have to come and live with we douen. You go find out things about we that no other human person know, starting tonight.” She twisted round to look at his silhouette, crouched on Benta’s back in the clotting dark. “Understand the trust I placing in your care, doux-doux. Understand that I doing it to save your life, but you have to guard ours in return.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “When you take one life, you must give back two. You go keep douen secrets safe? You must swear. I know you ain’t feel to talk right now, but you must swear out loud.”

  Tan-Tan’s heart was hammering hard and slow in her chest like drum. When you take one life, you must give back two. Tan-Tan bowed her head and accepted the obeah that Chichibud had just put on it. “I swear, Chichibud.”

  “Remember what you swear, child. Papa Bois listening.”

  What would he do now? She remembered how she used to think douen people were magic.

  “In the daytime,” Chichibud told her, “packbird is ground bird. But is nighttime now. No-one to see.”

  And he raised his voice: “Benta! Now!”

  The packbird gave a squawk that sounded like joy. She puffed her chest in and out repeatedly, then started to beat her wings, hard and fast. They were shadows whipping through the dark. And they were growing. The wings that Tan-Tan had always believed were clipped were filling out, getting long and strong.

  “Chichibud! What she doing?”

  He had to shout to be heard above the beating wings. “The channels in she wings does fill up with air when she need to fly.”