Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  “A fantasy of the weak, like God. There are only the eaters and the eaten. Come with me, Jane. We have things to do.”

  Paz watched, horrified, as she rose from the chair and went over to him, and he put his arm around her shoulders. Paz strained to move, but his limbs were uncoordinated and cramped. He fell out of the chair and sprawled on the floor. Moore laughed. “Jane, that’s one sorry nigger you picked. What is that boy doing? Praying? We’re going to have to have a talk about that sometime, Jane. Now, just so you know, here’s what we’re going to do right now. First, we’re going to lay your pal here down on your kitchen table, and I have to say it’s really so convenient that you arranged a pregnant neighbor, and I’m going to complete my okunikua, and you’re going to help, just like you did that time in Danolo. Maybe I’ll save a bite or two for you.”

  “I never helped,” she said. Paz thought her voice sounded weak and tired. He found he was able to sit up now.

  “Yes, you did, Janey. You just don’t remember. But you will when you have a taste again. Then we’re going to leave this town, which if you remember we never liked, and have some fun together.”

  Dawn climbed up on the table. Moore unbuttoned her shirt. Paz got to his feet. He couldn’t think of what to do. He couldn’t think at all, because as soon as his mind stopped being full of the prayer, it was occupied by someone who wasn’t him, someone nasty and full of rage.

  Jane said, “I want my little girl. I want Luz.”

  “No time for that, Jane.” He took a knife made of shining black stone out of his pocket.

  “I get to bring Luz, or I don’t go. I can’t beat you, but I can mess up this ritual. You can’t control me and her and him at the same time.”

  He raised the knife, wiggled it. “I could fix that.”

  “Yes, you can kill me. But then who will you have to show off for?”

  Moore considered this for a moment and laughed. “Oh, all right, the little orphan girl. We’ll take her along, too. A happy family. I can train her.” He turned to Paz. “My nigger? Would you kindly go and fetch my wife’s rug rat?” Paz headed for the ladder. It seemed like the right thing to do. As he ascended, he heard Moore say, “You know, we should take him along, too. We need someone to step and fetchit. We’ll have to customize him, though. He’ll be a lot of fun, until he starts to smell bad. Jane, is that a tear? Oh, you like him? You slut, Jane! Now, we’re definitely taking him.”

  Paz found he could stand. He walked to the ladder and climbed up to the loft. The child was not sleeping. She was sitting up in bed doing something to her feet. He checked out the room, still mumbling the prayer. No way out, except through the high window. Besides, why should he try to save the kid, it wasn’t his kid, just a … No! Focus, Paz, pray, pray, take the child. What was she doing? Trying to pull on a pair of bright canary-colored tights over her thin legs. He bent and helped her. She handed him a little leotard in the same color; wordlessly he pulled it onto her. Pray. There were fluffy feathers glued or sewn to the leotard, and golden spangles on the front. “This is my canary costume,” said Luz. “It has wings, too.”

  It did. Paz attached them to the Velcro pads on the leotard. They were made of soft armature wire and yellow net and feathers. “I want to show my muffa.” Luz raced away for the ladder, Paz following.

  Paz saw what happened from the lowest step, or rather, his eyes recorded something, some events and patterns, that his brain could not adequately interpret. The little girl ran into the room, wings flapping. Jane saw her, cried out, and snatched her up. Jane was chanting something, her voice now strong and loud. She snatched a glass from the table and sprinkled a few drops of rum on the child’s head. Something happened in the room, it grew brighter, or the air became clear, more than clear, like air on a mountain, everything, every shiny surface was sharp, crystalline. The candles flared, their flames impossibly high, like welding torches. He himself felt different, the insistent voices in his head had stopped. He said a final Hail Mary, crossed himself, and thought of nothing, no thoughts, no plans or doubts crossed his mind; he was simply Paz.

  But around Jane and Moore things seemed different, blurry, like a bad TV getting ghosts, or messages from more than one channel. Both of them were stock-still, eyes closed in concentration, Jane clutching the child. Moore had grown bigger and blacker. He was naked, a different person?no, more than one person … Many arms, faces. Paz did not want to look at him. He looked at Jane and Luz instead.

  Something odd was happening with Luz, she seemed less distinct, her colors muddy. Luz … or was it Luz? Paz knew the child had a name and that he knew it, but he couldn’t quite recall what it was.

  “No!” A shriek from Jane. “You can’t do that! You can’t! It isn’t … debentchouajé … it will break the net!”

  Now came a violent change, as if all the air and color had been sucked from the room and replaced with an alien gas, an alien spectrum. A presence entered, something heavy, awful, and vast, something far larger than the room, larger than the world. Paz found he could hardly breathe, and also that he didn’t have to. Something had gone wrong with time. He felt turned to stone; he couldn’t move his head, but he saw it out of the corner of his eye.

  Until this moment Paz had thought that the carved depictions of African deities he had seen in museums were imaginary abstractions?the gigantic heads, the slitted eyes, the razor-sharp planes of the features; but now he found that they were actually very good likenesses. The room was full of people now, or rather flickering images, like a thousand films being shown at once, no, not that either … He could not take it in, but neither could he close his eyes. He understood, without knowing how he understood, that this was Ifa himself, not riding on a person, but the actual orisha, the lord of fate.

  Around him time ripped away from its welding to space and matter. He saw Jane, as she was now, and as a baby, and a little girl, and as a pregnant woman with a swelling middle, and as a crone, and dead, all together, as the gods see us, and Jane, his Jane, was bowing to the being with her hands covering her face. He heard screams. Geometries that the human brain was not designed to record occupied the room. Paz shut his eyes.

  Now blackness and … it came to him then, a dream, or a memory. His room, above the restaurant on Flagler, he must have been four or five, waking at night to the sound of drums, going out of the little room he shared with his mother, to the living room, and there was his mami, in a white dress, and other women and men with drums and a strange smell in the air, smoke and rum, and they were playing drums, and he went up to his mami, frightened, and she turned around and there was someone else living in his mami. He screamed and someone picked him up, a thin man, and he said, Forget this, little boy, go to sleep.

  His mother was shaking him. He was late for school. He tried to pull the covers over his head, but they weren’t there. She was grabbing at his arm, his hand, putting something into it, something heavy. He opened his eyes.

  His mother said, “Outside. They’re coming to help him.”

  Questions formed but froze on his tongue. He looked at what was in his hand and saw that it was Jane’s Mauser pistol. He got up and walked slowly around the periphery of the room, fingers trailing the walls, the furniture, eyes on the ground. There was still stuff going on that he didn’t want to know about. He found the doorknob and went out onto the landing.

  One of them was already on the stairs, a squat brown man in an undershirt and shorts. He looked ordinary except for all the blood on him. Paz shot him in the chest. The thing kept on coming. He remembered you weren’t supposed to let them touch you. Paz shot him again and the man collapsed and rolled down the stairs. Others appeared at intervals. The last one was Eightball Swett, identifiable only by his clothes and the smell, because his face had mostly fallen off. Paz used the last of the bullets on him. He looked at the big pistol, its action popped back, the breech empty.

  What a peculiar dream, he thought, I really want to remember this when I get up. He walked back thro
ugh the open door into Jane’s apartment.

  The weirdness had quite gone, replaced by what looked like a candlelit domestic scene except that Dawn Slotsky was lying naked on the kitchen table. Jane seemed to be talking to Moore in an ordinary voice, while on her hip perched the little girl, still in the yellow bird costume.

  “I was the goat,” Jane said. “God knows how long Uluné has been planning this, probably before either of us was born. He set a trap for the leopard in a village far away. And you fell into it. You tried to unmake time before you’d done the fourth sacrifice. Maybe if you’d waited, you might have been able to whip Ifa, I don’t know. But he came, just like in Ifé in the old days, not mounted, but as himself. And he took it all back, all the power, like they did in the Ilidoni .”

  She set the child down. Paz saw his mother motioning to him. He walked over to her and she threw her arms around him, hugging him like she used to when he was small. He started to ask her what was going on, but she held her fingers over his mouth. They both looked at Jane and her husband.

  “You can’t do sorcery anymore, can you? The rat bit the baby, so they burned down the house.” Her voice became softer, and she reached out her hand to him, tentatively. “Is there any of you left in there, Witt? Anything?”

  Paz couldn’t see the man’s face, but he saw the glittering black knife flying at the little girl and heard the hoarse cry, words in a tongue he didn’t know, issue from the man’s throat. He pulled away from his mother and leaped toward them, although he knew it was going to be too late. But Jane stepped aside and crouched, with the little girl still on her hip, and somehow the man went stumbling across the room. He caromed off the refrigerator. The glass knife flew from his hand, spun through the air, hit the stove top, and shattered.

  Now a high-pitched shrieking, like a siren. Dawn Slotsky was back among the conscious. Paz started to move toward Moore, but Slotsky was off the table and on him, screaming and battering Paz with her fists. She sank her nails into his face. He grabbed at her hands, and over her shoulder was able to see Witt Moore get to his feet and take an eight-inch chef’s knife from the magnetic rack over the sink. Paz looked around wildly for Jane but she was gone. In an instant so was Moore. Paz yelled for his mother.

  It took them a few minutes to get Dawn Slotsky down to where she was just weeping hysterically. Mrs. Paz took her into the little bedroom and laid her into the hammock, crooning gently. Paz left them to it and got his Glock out of the cupboard. He knew where they’d gone. He could hear the footsteps above him.

  The ladder led into darkness. He stopped with his head just above the loft’s floor and waited for his eyes to adjust. Faint moonlight came in through a high, round window. Green light glowed from some kind of cartoon character nightlight plugged into a wall socket. He could hear bodies moving in the dark and he could hear Jane Doe’s voice.

  “You can still get away,” she said. “You could go back to Africa, you could see Uluné. He’d help you. You could try to …”

  There was the sound of a more violent movement. Paz could now make out what was happening. Moore was stalking his wife. She was backing away from him; he was trying to corner her. Every so often, he would leap and lunge and strike with his knife, and she would simply not be where he expected her to be, or where Paz expected her to be, for that matter. Things were vague in the darkness, but it looked to Paz a lot like magic.

  And all the time she was talking. “You could try,” she said, “to unravel the evil, to make some good come out of it. You could have a life.”

  This was too much for Paz. He walked the few steps up to the floor of the loft.

  “Drop the knife, Moore,” he shouted. They both froze and looked at him.

  Jane cried, “Oh, no, please …”

  Moore broke into a clumsy run, directly at Paz, with the knife held out rigidly before him, like a spear. Paz saw the shine of his face, the sweat flying, he saw the gleam of his bared teeth and the eyes, white, empty. Almost without willing it, Paz fired twice. Moore kept moving for a few feet until the hydrostatic shock turned his muscles to jelly and he dropped to his knees. The rigid knife arm sagged, and he fell over slowly onto his right side. Paz kicked the knife away.

  Then Jane Doe was kneeling by the side of the fallen man, touching his face; she was making high-pitched, awful, keening noises. Moore’s mouth was open, and he seemed about to speak. Paz saw that there was a look of profound surprise on the face. Jane held his face in her hands, and Moore now seemed to see her for the first time. He said, “What? What?” and then he started choking, and blood that looked black in the moonlight shot from his mouth and covered Jane Doe’s hands.

  Jane started to scream then, and pull her short hair and scratch her face. Paz grabbed her so she wouldn’t hurt herself. She fought him and he picked up a few more scratches. He was thinking that, except for his mother, there had never been a woman in his life who would mourn for him like this, and the thought made him feel sad and hopeless.

  It took Paz and his mother the better part of an hour to get Jane Doe to stop screaming, and the little girl went into hysterics too. In the end Mrs. Paz made both of them drink something, and within a few minutes they were both asleep. Paz carried Jane to her hammock next to Dawn and the child to her bed. Then he called the cops.

  After that, he was involved in police business for the better part of eight hours. It was extremely comforting, as was the story he invented on the fly. Witt Moore, celebrated author, it turned out, was also a devil-worshiping serial killer, who, together with his gang of lowlifes and a large supply of psychotropic aerosols, had terrorized Miami as the Mad Abortionist. He had tried it again, with Dawn Slotsky, but Detective Paz, who just happened to be in the neighborhood interviewing Moore’s wife, was able to thwart the crime, shooting all the gang members in the process, including Moore himself, who had died while trying to kill Jane Doe Moore with a knife (Exhibit A). They had the pieces of an obsidian knife that was probably the murder weapon in the serial killings, too. The best part was that the bad guys were all dead, which meant no legal proceedings were in the offing, which cut down on the uncomfortable questions. Did anyone really believe the strange tale? They certainly wanted to, and the more it was discussed, the more the talking heads discussed it, the more the police PR people gave confident interviews to those talking heads, the more it took on the solidity of the truth.

  Paz, however, wanted to know what had really happened, so around midday, he pushed away a mound of paperwork, slipped out of headquarters, and swung by Jane’s, bulling his way through the lines of media people, nodding to the cops on duty as guards. He found his mother still there, making herself at home, talking with Jane and the child around a table laden with food, like a happy family. He fit right in, because he discovered that he was incredibly hungry.

  “I told you,” said his mother.

  After he ate, he went outside, motioning for Jane to come along with him. They sat at the picnic table in the yard, out of the cameras’ view.

  “So what happened?” he demanded.

  “You’re asking me? You seem to know the whole story. We went over to Polly’s a little while ago and watched the police chief on TV. You were on, too.”

  “I don’t mean that bullshit. I mean what happened ? For example, I shot those … guys?” he asked.

  “Yes. That was very useful. A very police thing to do.”

  “And what went down between you and Moore?”

  “The short version? I met him in m’doli as I planned. But I wasn’t ready. The circle of allies was wrong, so I was too weak to defeat him there. Because it wasn’t the chicken. Luz was the third ally, the yellow bird …”

  “Yeah, I kind of got that, but she started to … I don’t know, fade.”

  “Yeah. He was unmaking time, so that I wouldn’t meet her. So she wouldn’t be here.”

  “Uh-huh. He can do that?”

  “Technically, yes. But it’s not allowed. Ifa doesn’t like it. The rat bit the b
aby and Ifa pulled down the house.”

  “Come again?”

  “An old saying. Uluné set all of it up, a trap, and he fell into it. Anyway, you probably noticed some weird stuff going on.”

  “Um, yeah, there were some, um, unusual phenomena, I would grant you that. What was it, some kind of drug?”

  He saw several expressions flit over her face. Irritation, then resignation, then the strong features relaxing into what looked like compassion. He noticed that she was beautiful in an unfamiliar way, like the statues of the orishas in the little Cuban shops.

  “Yeah. Some kind of drug. That, or the nature of reality you’ve accepted for your entire life is wrong. You choose.”

  “Drugs,” said Paz. “And so, what? He’s dead so that means it’s all over?”

  “For the moment. I’m going to bury him in Sionnet.” She wiped her eyes. “He was a lovely man.”

  “Yeah, well, you could have fooled me.”

  “Oh, that wasn’t Witt. That was some chunks of him, the worst chunks, the fear and the hatred, assembled into a kind of robot. Like a zombie but more capable. People do that to themselves all the time, I mean, really, look at the people who run for office. But this was done to him by an Olo witch. He let it be done to him, the poor man.”

  “But anyway, we’re out of danger?” Paz had limited sympathy for the deceased.

  “You all are. Me, I’m … what’s the word? Or’ashnet in Olo. Deodand, touched by a god, spiritually unstable. Part of me is stuck in m’doli, and I’m sort of vulnerable to beings who live there. I have to escape by water, to fulfill the prophecy.”

  The day went on, life cranked up again, as if nothing had happened to time, again there were sixty seconds to be lived in each precious minute. Mrs. Paz went back to her restaurant. Dawn’s husband came home and took her away. Paz and Jane slipped away with Luz to Providence, where they watched the yellow bird in the Noah play. They went to the Grove for ice cream, and to the park. Oddly enough, no one recognized them. Magic, or their fifteen minutes were over? Paz didn’t know and didn’t care. He lay back on Jane’s blanket, with his cheek close to her thigh, and felt as happy as he had ever been.