Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  A brief check in the mirror to insure as much invisibility as I can muster. The blinds are drawn, the light in my kitchen is out, my spectacles are on, my pathetic bangs are in place. I open the door, and my knees almost fail to hold me up. I must clutch at the doorpost. For an instant, I think I’m back in a dream, that my husband is standing in front of me with a police badge stuck, as a little joke, in the pocket of his sports jacket. He says, “Detective Paz, ma’am, Miami PD. Could I …” His face registers concern and he adds, “Excuse me, are you all right?”

  But an instant later I see that it isn’t him. The structure of the face is different, with higher cheekbones and a lower hairline; he’s solider, too, with more muscle in the shoulders and neck; his eyes are yellow-brown, not hazel-gray, like Witt’s. And that jacket, no, Witt didn’t care about nice clothes, this all flashed through my mind while some ogga in there yells, “Asshole! He could show up in the dress uniform of the Grenadier fucking Guards?it’s a dream!”

  But I back away and let him in, saying, “No, it’s … in the yard … horrible. Will they … take it away soon? I don’t want my daughter …”

  I sit in one of my two chairs. He’s staring at me. “Yes, ma’am, the M.E.’s here now. It’ll all be gone in ten minutes or so.” He sits across the table. He brings out a notebook and mechanical pencil. I drop my head and work on getting my ki out of my throat and down where it belongs.

  “You’re, um, Dolores Tuoey?” I confess that I am. I am finding it hard to meet his eyes. “Ms. Tuoey,” he says, “did you see or hear anything unusual last night, anything at all?”

  “No, not really,” I say. “Jake?that’s Polly’s dog?woke me up. Then I heard Polly come out, to shut him up. We have raccoons and possums and sometimes he barks at them, and I heard her yell, and I went out to see what it was. I’m sorry I can’t help you more.”

  “Okay, I assume you realize what you got out there in the yard …”

  “Yes, it’s a dead newborn. I used to be a nurse-midwife.”

  “Really? I meant do you know who did it?”

  “No! How could I …” Protesting too much here. I focus on the next breath. The next.

  “I mean you know we’re looking for a serial killer who attacks pregnant women. It’s in all the papers and the TV?”

  “Oh, right, of course. Yes. And this is one of his. Yes.”

  “Right. Now, can you think of any reason why our perpetrator would choose this particular yard to leave this dead baby? A man, maybe. Anyone you know, anyone you’ve seen hanging around?”

  I am forming a neutral answer when little pounding feet sound above, and on the ladder, and Luz jets into the room in her nightgown. We both look at her and she stops dead when she sees the detective, and runs to me and hides her face against my side. I put my faithless arm around her.

  The detective says, “This must be your daughter?”

  “Yes. Luz, honey, say hi to Detective Paz.” More burrowing; a snatched peek. “She’s shy.”

  “Yes. She’s real pretty, though.” He looks from me to her. I can see him thinking about Gregor Mendel and his rules of heredity and I wish I had learned to do chint’chotuné, the thought spells that make people forget, or recall things that did not occur. No, I don’t wish that. I wish I were far away with Luz.

  He puts away his notebook, slides a business card across the table, and says, “Here’s my card, ma’am. I’ll be by to check with you later. A lot of times we find that even though people don’t recall things right after a shocking event, they’ll come around in a couple of days, something will just pop into their heads. And if you do think of anything like that, please call me anytime, day or night. This guy, well, he seems to be very hard to catch. And he’s going to do it again, unless we can stop him. Another woman, another baby, the families …”

  I say, too quickly, “I wish I could help, but really, I didn’t see or hear anything.” Now I see something cold pass into his eyes. I can’t look at him. He says, “Forgive me for asking, but you said you were a nurse-midwife. Where was that? Where you practiced.”

  “In the Boston area. And in Africa. In Mali. I’ve just been back two years or so.”

  “I see. Africa, huh? That must have been exciting. So, I guess Luz was born in Africa. Her dad live here, too?”

  “No, he died in Mali.” Stupid! Why am I talking so much? I push the chair back and stand. “Excuse me, but I have to dress her and get her to nursery school and get myself to work, so if there’s nothing else …”

  He gets up, too, and smiles, an unpleasant cat sort of smile.

  “We’ll be in touch.” I let him out and I say, trained to politeness, “Good-bye, Detective Paz,” and he says, “So long, Jane,” as he pulls the door shut, not looking back, and I pretend I haven’t heard him as my blood freezes.

  I sit stunned for a while in the dim kitchen, until Luz brings me out of it with demands for breakfast, milk in the special glass with the Little Mermaid on it, and also a discussion about the day’s outfit, and chatter about the Noah’s ark play she is to be in at nursery school. Who was that man, Muffa? He was a policeman. What did he want? He was looking for a bad man and he wanted me to help him. What did the bad man do? He hurt someone. Who? I don’t know, honey. Do you want your blue T-shirt or your purple? I can cope with this and breathe, just about. In fact, serving the tiny priestess my soul-daughter has become is probably the best thing I can do right at this moment, obsession being just the thing for keeping the demons at bay, as so many nuts have found over the years. What else can you do? So maybe that cop didn’t say that, maybe that was just an ordinary hallucination, brought on by tension and lack of sleep. Yes. Certainly. He must have said “So long, ma’am.” Okay, right: on with the day. I get Luz into her clothes and, after I have checked that the corpse is gone, we go out. There is crime-scene tape still up, and various technical people are floating around the yard, and my cop is standing there with another man, taller, with pale eyes and the face of a lynch-mob leader. As I walk to the car, their eyes follow me, and my cop is talking.

  I have a big day today. Just like in dreamland, it is payday, my final day. At lunchtime, they even give a little party for me, and Mrs. Waley gives her usual speech, we will all miss Dolores, and Lulu and Cleo come over from admin and hug me and I get a nice box of Helena Rubenstein makeup from them as a going-away present. And I do my duties meticulously while squeezing in a class A felony on what will likely be the very last medical records pickup run of my life. For on my stop at the pharmacy department, where of course they know me, and where I am, while not as invisible as my husband can be, still pretty invisible, I wait until no one is looking and lean through the hatch where the little plastic boxes are waiting and snatch up the one that goes to the fat clinic. I put it on my cart with the records and roll away, and while alone for a moment in the elevator I transfer fifty or so 10 mg generic dextroamphetamine caps to my cheap purse, a few from each vial, and drop the depleted tray off at the clinic. It is better in any case for dieters to avoid harsh drugs. Perhaps, like me, they might rely on terror to maintain a desirable and healthy slenderness.

  Am I still dreaming? Are you? In one of the damp hallways of the hospital I come across a giant flying cockroach of the type people hereabouts call palmetto bugs. I examine it closely. I prod it with my foot and it scuttles away. It’s big enough, but it doesn’t talk to me, or bring ten thousand friends to the party, or fly into my mouth. It is just a dear, cuddly, regular cockroach. So I am probably back in the dream we have all agreed is life.

  After work, I go down to the credit union office in the basement of my building, cash my terminal check, close out my account, and walk out with about thirteen hundred dollars. Feeling a little heavy-lidded and logy now, I take a dex and exit into the steam bath of late afternoon. I will take the Buick to the transmission place and cab back. In a while, I am striding down the street, the speed is starting to kick in, I am feeling the tinglies, and that feeling of anticipation you g
et, something big is about to happen and I’m ready for it. What happens is that one of the louts who hang out at the corner store I have to pass twice a day decides to mug me.

  It must have been something about the way I was walking, or maybe he just smelled the money and the dope. It would have been the score of a lifetime: I knock over this ugly white bitch, man, and she got near a grand and a half and a load of speed. I notice him peel off the knot of cronies and follow me. He is a good-sized, shoe-polish-brown kid, maybe sixteen, a little over six feet and lean, with the usual look of babyish meanness on his face. There is a vacant lot up ahead, and that’s where he will trot up behind me, throw a yoke around my neck with his left arm, extract my purse with his right, drag me into the weeds, hit me in the face a couple of times, and walk off.

  What actually happens is that when his arm reaches around my neck I stoop a little and put both my hands around his wrist and whirl to my left on my left foot and step out, conserving his forward motion and adding to it, and now I have his wrist and his elbow up high, dancing in a big half circle across the pavement, because you always move circlewise in aikido. I apply some leverage so that his upper body overbalances and I run his face into the base of a phone pole, not too hard. Oshi-taoshi; I’ve done it a thousand times, but only this once in real life.

  Then suddenly I’m pushed away and a man is kneeling on the back of my dancing partner and attaching handcuffs to his wrists. I see that it is Detective Paz. I start to walk away, but he shouts at me and leaves the boy and comes up and grabs my arm. I look pointedly at his grip and he lets go. He is breathing a little hard, but he is not sweating and his beautiful jacket, shirt, and tie are unrumpled. He says, trying a smile, “You almost got mugged. You can’t just leave.”

  I stare at him through my tinted spectacles. I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That guy, the homey. He was trying to mug you. You would’ve been in trouble if I hadn’t come along.”

  I give him a look. He shrugs off the little lie with a grin. I say, “You’re mistaken, Detective. He tripped and fell. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment.” I take off before he can say anything else. Obviously, he has been following me. Terrific.

  I drive down Flagler, past pets, which seems to be closed, and to my transmission guy, a few blocks west. I leave the car with him, and he promises three days, which means a week. Do I even need my car anymore? The notion of physical escape seems to have vanished, or at least escape by land. While I wait for whatever is going to happen, and still assuming that I am not still in dreamland, I can take Luz to school and shop on foot, or maybe I’ll buy a secondhand bike and a bike seat. I use the pay phone to call a cab and stand out on the street to wait. The transmission guy seems to be staring at me in an odd way. I check my reflection in the plate glass of his window. There seems nothing wrong. I move toward the curb.

  Next to the transmission place is one of those hole-in-the-wall cafés that consists only of a service hatch and a row of stools outside. These are occupied by an assortment of middle-aged men sipping from tiny cups. They are staring at me, too; their faces are full of vague aggression; their eyes are dark and hot. I direct my gaze across the street to where a group of people are waiting for a jitney. I cross the street. I could take the jitney east on Flagler, to where I can catch a Metro train to the Grove. This would save some money, but I am reluctant. The configuration of the group is profoundly menacing; I read threat in the way they are standing: two Latina women in tan servant’s uniforms; a dark woman with shopping bags, with a little girl and an older boy in tow; a zombie; two thin Oriental guys in cook’s whites speaking Cuban Spanish; and a very fat copper-skinned woman with a cane and a palm fan, all typically what you would find at any such corner in low-rent Miami, except maybe for the zombie. The Olo call such creatures paarolawats .

  They are staring at me, not directly, but sidelong, and when I look away, I can feel their eyes on my back. No jitney, then. Wait for the cab. The dispatcher said ten minutes, although, really, my Spanish is not that hot, maybe he said thirty. Or never.

  The paarolawats comes a little closer to me. A faint breeze stirs (maybe from the fan of the fat lady!) and I catch his smell, a horrible reek of old alcohol and unwashed, perhaps even slightly putrid flesh, and, of course, dulfana. This one is a crumpled-looking man, anywhere from forty-five to sixty-five years, wearing wino rags, balding, whose freckled skin’s base color is that of a cardboard carton left out in the sun and rain. He’s looking right at me, out of his dead eyes; he shuffles a step closer, then another. The jitney arrives at the curb, an old Ford Econoline van driven by a skeletal Haitian. The waiting people board it, casting baleful looks at me as they pass, or so it seems.

  The jitney pulls away, and I’m left alone with the paarolawats. He slips-slides toward me in that horrible way they have, which I remember even though I have only seen one before. You’re not supposed to let them touch you, I remember that, too. They’re loaded with all kinds of exotic chemicals; their skin is dripping with witch secretions. The horror movies have it right for once. I back away. I am thinking, This would be a good time to wake up, if this is a dream, and if not I am going to have to run for it, if that fucking cab doesn’t get here in one minute, and then a voice behind me says, “Hey, there, Eightball, what’s happening?”

  It is the detective, again. He is walking toward the paarolawats, with his hand out. He is going to shake hands with a zombie! I move quickly to stand in his way and I say, “Detective, I just remembered something I forgot to tell you.”

  “Yeah? That’s great, ma’am. Do you know old Eightball Swett, here? Mr. Swett is one of our colorful neighborhood characters …”

  I grab his sleeve. “No, he’s not. Could we go to your car? I mean right now!” Because the thing has begun to move, a couple of quick shuffles and he’s reaching out his hand. They can move pretty fast over short distances, although, depending on how ripe they are, if they push it any they tend to lose bits and pieces.

  The detective picks up my tone and lets me drag him to his white Impala. We both get in, and the paarolawats is right there as I close the door with a slam. He paws at the window and a bit of him sticks to the glass like bird shit. Now I’m practically crying, “Please drive, please drive drive drive drive drive!”

  When we are well away, he says, “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

  “I was just nervous. That man made me nervous.”

  “Nervous?” he says. “That palsied piss-bum made you nervous, when less than an hour ago I saw you take down a big strong gangbanger practically without breaking stride?” I am silent. He says, “We need to have a talk, Jane.”

  “I told you, my name is Dolores Tuoey,” I say, barely convincing myself.

  “Jane Doe. I should say, Dr. Doe, really. I read your paper on the Olo. Some of it went past me, but what I could understand was pretty amazing.”

  Last shot. “I’m not Jane Doe. People were always getting us confused.”

  “Really? Whereabouts was this?”

  “Bamako. In Mali. I was a nurse-midwife there and she was doing some anthro work upcountry in the Boucle de Baoulé. We ran into each other from time to time and … people commented. Jane’s dead, I heard.”

  “Yeah, and she must be buried under a plain tablet in Calvary Cemetery in Waltham, Mass., with ‘Sister Mary Dolores Tuoey, S.M.’ on it. You know, Jane, the problem with phony ID, especially if it’s based on a real person, is that it’s like a model of the Golden Gate Bridge made out of toothpicks. They look sort of okay, but they won’t bear any real weight.”

  He gives me a bright cat smile. “So why’d you fake the suicide?”

  “I have to pick up my daughter,” I croak. My mouth feels full of fine sand.

  “Yeah, she’s at Providence. Okay, no problem.” He turned south onto Dixie Highway. “Actually there is a small problem: where did you get the daughter? You sure didn’t have one when you sailed awa
y into the sunset. Your dad would have noticed it. I met your dad the other day, as a matter of fact. He doesn’t miss much, Jack Doe.”

  I say nothing, feeling miserable, like a kid caught out in a dumb fib. In silence, then, we arrive at Providence. Luz is with her little gang of girls, gossiping. I wave and call out. Luz comes up to the strange car, her face clouding. I get out and hug her, and tell her our car is getting fixed and the nice policeman from this morning is going to drive us home.

  Which he does, and makes no move to drive away out of my life, but gets out and follows us up the stairs as if invited. I make Luz her snack, carrot cake and lemonade, popping another two pills privily as I do so, and I offer some refreshment to him. He accepts, and we all snack away like a thermonuclear family. Luz is uncharacteristically quiet; she is used to the dyad, or Polly’s family, or school, and also she picks up the tension. I prod her about her day. She sang. Some of the kids got their costumes, but she did not. She hopes to be a robin or an owl. Or a fish. As we talk, I see that she keeps casting sidelong looks at him, at her little arm and his big hand and wrist on the table, and no wonder, they are almost exactly the same color. She asks if she can go play with Eleanor across the street. I watch her from the landing as she trots across and rings Dawn Slotsky’s bell.

  “Nice kid,” he says. “She seems to get on with you pretty good. It’d be a shame to see her end up in some foster home.”

  “Why? Are you going to arrest me?”