She held to the rim of the dumpster and, using all of her strength, pulled again to lift herself up. She stuck one elbow inside, then the other. There he was, little Dorothy’s Angel, crying his lungs out, lying on the garbage. If she could just manage to pull one leg up… She fell down on her backside.
How was she going to get him out? She started sobbing. What would her mother have done? She would have had a better plan, certainly. Could she just forget about the child and run? What if the rats ate him? Her mother would have summoned the goat, that’s what she would have done. She brushed the tears off her face with the sleeve of her sweater. She should have insisted that President Buer accompany her. After all, he was going to be her familiar. But he didn’t seem to be that fond of her. She didn’t want to inconvenience him too much, lest he change his mind and stop helping her. She would understand if he left. She wasn’t as refined or as well-educated as the people he was used to serving. That was probably why he didn’t like her. He must have thought very poorly of her after finding out she earned her living cleaning houses. He was a President in Hell, after all, and she was dirt poor, dirt poor and ugly, and quite ignorant of all things related to magic. If those men caught her and did something to her, it wouldn’t be a terrible loss, surely. Good riddance! She sniffled deeply. Maybe the Devil wanted her to fail and that’s why Buer hadn’t come. Who would take care of her sisters if she went to prison? She looked around the street in despair. No one around. Nothing to help her climb into the trash container. Next time, she thought, wiping the tears from her face with her apron, she would insist that the fiend turned again into a spider and traveled with her in her pocket.
From the place where Josie had borrowed the little woman’s bike it was just a couple of blocks to where she and Heather had left Russell. The pedals hurt on her bare feet, but she no longer cared about physical pain. She had to help him.
“THERE!” She heard a male voice holler behind her.
She felt then a small rock hit the back of her shoulder. She stopped to look behind her. Four black men armed with bats and garden tools were running towards her with a rabid look in their eyes.
“Don’t let her go!”
The original troop had divided in two. One half had taken the streets in Milwood, while the other group, led by Antoine and Mr. Hamm, took the streets north of the Triangle. Not knowing the exact address of Ms. Cummings, the alleged child’s abductor, they had spent the last half hour patrolling the streets at random, knocking on every other door, pleading for help at every open window.
“Fire!” Josie screamed, aware that cries of rape may not be helpful. “Police! Fire!”
More rocks flew around her. She pedaled faster, but the handlebars wobbled dangerously. She lost control and fell down, scraping her face and arms on the pavement. She rose up and saw the men approaching her.
“Rape!” she screamed, forgetting about the safer call for fire. “Please, help—they’re going to rape me!”
“Where’s the baby?” Antoine pulled her up by the collar of her blouse.
“What baby?” Josie asked, dumbfounded.
“The baby you stole from his crib, you stupid bitch!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You do know what I’m talking about,” Antoine shook her. “You do know, you stupid bitch. This is his blanket,” he added, pulling the baby mantle off the bike and putting it in front of Josie’s face. “What did you do to him?”
“Who?”
“She must have killed him, Dad.”
“Let her have it!”
“What did you do to our child?” Mr. Hamm intervened.
“What child?”
Antoine grabbed the girl by the neck. “Where did you leave him?”
“Rape!”
“Shut up, bitch!” Antoine shook her, but Josie wouldn’t stop screaming. He shoved a piece of the baby’s blanket into her mouth and threatened her with his fist.
“Are you going to tell me what you did to that baby, or am I gonna have to get it out of you?”
The lights of a car coming down the street blinded Antoine. He straightened up, but didn’t let go off Josie. The car stopped a few yards from them.
The driver stuck his head out of the window. He was holding a gun, aiming directly at Antoine.
“Get your fucking nigger hands off of that girl,” Heather’s ex-boyfriend said.
“Who the fuck are you?” Antoine asked.
“I said to get your fucking hands off of that girl,” Will insisted, stepping out of the car. His two friends were still with him. The one on the passenger side stepped out too. He had a big wrench in his hand.
Antoine stood still. “This is none of your business,” he yelled back. “You don’t know what this bitch did.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about what she did. All I know is that if you don’t take your hands off her, I’m gonna have to fucking kill you. And then I’ll kill those two cotton-pickers, too. And then the fat brother,” he pointed at Mr. Hamm. “I have enough bullets.”
Antoine let go of Josie.
“C’mon, miss,” her rescuer invited her into the car. “Get inside.”
Josie hesitated.
“You’ll be safer with us,” Will urged her. “I promise.”
Josie looked at Antoine’s face. The veins in his forehead threatened to explode. He was covered in sweat. His panting sounded like that of a wild beast, ready to jump on her and rip her into pieces. Then she looked at her savior. He looked calm. Straight from the fridge. In full control of the situation. In other circumstances, she would have found Will a handsome man—tall, dark, with an interesting nose and thick eyebrows. She focused instead on the shiny dental crown on one of his front teeth. He looked like a safecracker.
“Get in, goddammit!”
Still, he was her best option. Josie staggered to the back door on the driver’s side that Will rushed to open.
She was already inside, when Mr. Hamm yelled, “She took my grandson!” and then hit one of the front lights of the Cadillac with one of the boys’ bats.
“You fucking jigaboo!” Will clicked off the safety pin of his gun and aimed at the old man.
Scared of the weapon, Josie climbed over Will’s friend on the passenger’s side and ran away.
“What the fuck—?” Will called her back.
Before he could shoot, Antoine jumped on top of the gangster, yanked his hair down, and banged his head against the roof of the car until he dropped the gun. Will’s friends rushed to help him, but Mr. Hamm and Antoine’s sons greeted them with some good clubbing.
Antoine picked up the gun. “Don’t let her go,” he ordered his men, pointing at the direction in which Josie had run, then aimed the gun at Will. “Get the fuck outta here.”
Defeated, the three men got back into the car and sped away.
Meanwhile, on Broadway Street, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord and Lazybones John had managed to convince Mrs. Hamm of their good intentions and to the cry of “Who’s with me?” the giant had formed a new contingent. Three of his new recruits were women: Mrs. Hamm herself, Miss Johnson, and Mrs. Lucas, two neighbors from down the street. The fourth was a cat from 6th and Westminster called Sully, a friend of the poet and a regular at the Gas House Café, who happened to have an old truck and gladly consented to drive the women and his two friends to Ms. Cummings’ house on Altair Place.
Big Daddy had an advantage over the other two parties. He knew exactly where the sanctimonious churchgoer lived: not in Milwood, but in the northern end of the Silver Triangle, in a tiny yellow house with a huge palm tree in its front yard, on the corner of Altair Place and Andalusia, “in what used to be the United States Island,” the poet explained, a complex of miniature summer cottages originally surrounded by water.
“She announces it to the world at every one of those dam
ned Civic Union meetings,” Big Daddy explained to Mrs. Hamm, seated between him and Sully in the front of the truck. John, Miss Johnson, and Mrs. Lucas rode in the bed. “She does it with as much pride as a member of the British nobility mentioning her lineage. She gives her address, her date of birth, and her occupation, before going on and on about how the homes by the trace of the old canals represent the last ‘bulwark of respectability’ in Venice and how the ‘dissoluteness and low morals of the patrons that frequent the Gas House Café’ and all the ‘lowlifes that had recently moved to the beach’ put the community in danger.”
“Shit is about to hit the fan, man,” at the wheel, Sully responded.
“That hag will learn the true meaning of dissoluteness,” Big Daddy nodded.
The fan was blowing at full speed, but sadly, facing the wrong direction. Somebody had finally called the police about the men armed with bats and gardening tools patrolling the streets of the Triangle, and, as Sully drove his truck down Westminster, he had to veer abruptly at the intersection with Electric to avoid hitting a young woman running in the middle of the street calling desperately for help—our frightened-for-her-life Josie—and ended up crashing into a patrol car coming from the opposite direction.
No one was hurt in the front cabin, but Miss Johnson fell from the truck bed to the pavement, and the officer driving the patrol car slammed his face against the steering wheel.
Josie banged frantically on the window of the patrol car.
“Help me!” she pleaded to the dizzy policeman, pointing at the men still chasing her.
“Arrest that woman!” Mr. Hamm yelled, running towards the accident.
Josie opened the patrol car’s door. The officer’s face was covered in blood from a cut above his left eyebrow.
“They’re trying to rape me!” Josie shook him. “Help me!”
“She stole a child!” Antoine flaunted the gun up high.
Sully stepped out of his truck.
“Man, she appeared from nowhere!”
“Help me…” Josie cried a last time.
The policeman was taking too long to react. Antoine and his men were getting closer. Josie reached for the officer’s gun.
“One more step and I’ll kill you,” she pointed the gun towards her attackers, trying to sound as tough as Heather’s ex-boyfriend had.
A second police car appeared behind her. Then a third one showed up, and four officers stepped out.
Josie ran towards the policemen, still holding the gun. One of them, twice her size, knocked her down while the other three focused their attention on Antoine, who kept brandishing his own gun up high.
“That’s it, arrest her!” Antoine exclaimed.
“Drop the gun!” The officers pointed their firearms at him.
“Arrest that woman!”
“Drop the gun,” Mr. Hamm recommended to his friend.
Antoine let the gun down and raised his arms over his head. So did his children.
“She stole a child—”
They didn’t let him finish. The officers jumped on the four men and started clubbing them.
Mrs. Hamm stepped out of the truck and tried to go to the aid of her husband but instead received some of the blows.
“She stole our grandson,” Mr. Hamm kept repeating.
In the meantime, Josie had already been handcuffed and was lying face down on the pavement.
“I didn’t do anything!” she cried. “I was just trying to defend myself!”
Big Daddy and John joined the scuffle, but they too were rewarded with some good batting. Mrs. Lucas, who had stepped down to help Miss Johnson stand up, got some as well. Everyone was yelling. Everyone cursed and bawled, pointing threatening fingers at each other, demanding that the other party be arrested. Everyone, therefore, was taken in, including poor Miss Johnson who couldn’t even remember what she had been doing in the bed of the truck in the first place.
“But you don’t understand!” Josie and Mrs. Hamm howled almost simultaneously as they were shoved into different patrol cars. “You’re taking the wrong people!”
14
In which we learn what happened with everyone else
In the meantime, the little woman had managed to return to the house on Linnie Canal in one piece. She had just entered the kitchen through the door that led to the alley when the door to the living room swung open.
Victoria stood there with a livid face. “You left an empty pot on the stove with the burners on.” She slapped her sister. “We could have died!”
“Why would you do that?” Rosa cried from her wheelchair. “Why are you so mean and so selfish?”
President Buer sat at the dining table, in his regular demon form, admiring his face in a hand mirror as he tried on different colors of lipstick. He had a nécessaire set on the table and an array of cosmetics in front of him. “Not my fault,” he mumbled, looking at the little woman from the corner of his eye. “Don’t even think to blame me. I thought the whole operation would take you less than ten minutes. To speed things up, I set a pot of water to boil on the stove. It took you almost an hour.”
“What do you have in there?” Victoria pointed at the bundle in the little woman’s arms, wrapped in her sweater. “Is that a child?”
“A child?” repeated Rosa. She attempted to stand up, but the pain in her knees forced her to sit again.
“It is a child!” Victoria confirmed, uncovering the baby.
“Were you going to give him a bath?” asked Rosa. “Is that what the water was for?”
The little witch looked down at her feet, holding tighter to her swag. Dorothy’s Angel was sleeping.
“She was going to cook him,” the fiend mumbled.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” asked Rosa.
“A boy,” President Buer responded. He pressed his moist red lips against a sheet of tissue.
“It’s a boy,” Victoria confirmed.
“What were you going to do with him?” asked Rosa. “Where did you get him?”
The little woman hunched, still not daring to look up.
“Is he an orphan?” insisted Rosa, stretching her neck as much as she could, trying to see the baby. “Ah,” she gasped. “You stole it!”
“Give it to me,” ordered Victoria, extending her hands.
The little woman resisted for a second. Then she gave up the child to Victoria.
“Oh, what a delicious piece of chocolate,” said the old bag.
“Is he black?” Rosa wheeled her chair forward. “He is! What do you want a child for? Let me see his feet.”
Victoria bent down to show the child to her sister.
“Black like a piece of rough ebony,” Rosa said.
“The color of a Hershey bar,” Victoria laughed.
President Buer snorted. He started to put away his cosmetics.
“Look at his feet,” said Rosa. “The little dogs. How tiny! What’s his name?”
The little woman shrugged.
“You don’t know his name?”
She shook her head.
“Dorothy,” Buer replied. “His name is Dorothy’s Angel.”
“That’s not the name of a boy,” Victoria said, having heard the demon, but thinking it had been Rosa who said the name. “He must be called something else.”
“But that’s his name,” President Buer insisted. He had cemented his face with makeup. As he spoke, a large furrow appeared on his brow. “Ask her.”
The little woman bobbed her head.
“He needs a different name,” Rosa said, oblivious to the demon.
“He’s such a delicious little bonbon. What about Bebé Bombón?” Victoria proposed.
Rosa’s face lit up. “I love it! Can we keep him?”
“Of course we’ll keep him,” Buer replied. “He’s tomorrow’s dinner,
isn’t he?” He gave a cold look to the little woman.
The little woman responded to the look by shaking her head repeatedly at her sister and extended her arms trying to get the child back.
Victoria stepped back. “No. If we let you have this child you’ll end up killing him. You know nothing about children.” She passed the child to Rosa. “You can hardly take care of yourself.”
“You cannot do anything well,” added Rosa.
“We are teachers. We went to school for that—didn’t we Rosa?” Victoria asked, trying to confirm a part of her life she had almost forgotten about. “We will raise this child and make of him a man of good.”
“I cannot wait for his first communion!” Rosa exclaimed.
“His confirmation!”
“Or the day of his wedding.”
“Get him some milk,” Victoria ordered the little woman when they ran out of things they couldn’t wait for. “And put some more water to boil,” she added after sniffing the child. “He definitely needs a bath.”
“He certainly does,” President Buer replied, sniffing the air. He had left the table and now stood next to them. “He’s going to be quite displeased when you wake him up, and I can’t stand children’s bawling. It is, therefore, time for me to retire—What are you waiting for?” he said to the little woman. “Do as your sisters tell you. You can’t expect them to take care of everything. And you can’t expect me to do your job all the time, either. I am not your servant. Not just yet.” He finished packing his makeup. “I’m in a terrible mood,” he added, walking to the door. “I have this awful toothache. I ate a jar full of toffees this morning. I’m going to bed,” he yawned. “I have loads of letters to write tomorrow.”
He opened the door and left without closing it behind. The little woman rushed to close it, then to help her sisters with their requests. She poured milk in a tall glass and put it inside a pot full of water to heat on the stove. Then she made a bed for the child in her sisters’ bedroom with a pillow inside a cardboard box. When she returned to the living room, Victoria had fallen asleep on the sofa feeding the baby from the glass of milk with a spoon. Rosa was watching television.
Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle Page 20