Still no response. Arceneaux looked into Garrigue’s eyes, and could not find Garrigue there, but only frozen, helpless terror. “Listen, Rene, I tell you something my daddy use to say. Daddy, he say to me always, di moin qui vous lamein, ma di cous qui vous ye. You tell me who you love, I tell you who you are.” Garrigue began returning slowly to his own eyes, looking back at him: expressionless, but present. Arceneaux said, “You think just maybe we know who we are, Compe’ Rene?”
Garrigue smiled a little, shakily. “Duplessis… Duplessis, he don’t love nobody. Never did.”
“So Duplessis ain’t nobody. Duplessis don’t exist. You gone be scared of somebody don’t exist?” Arceneaux slapped his old friend’s shoulder, hard. “Home now. Ti-Jean say.” They did go to their homes then, and they slept well, or at least they told each other so in the morning. Arceneaux judged that Garrigue might actually have slept through the night; for himself, he came and went, turning over a new half-dream of putting an end to Alexandre Duplessis each time he turned in his bed. Much of the waking time he spent simply calling into darkness inside himself, calling on his loa, as he had been taught to do when young, crying out, Damballa Wedo, great serpent, you got to help us, this on you… Bon Dieu can’t be no use here, ain’t his country, he don’t speak the patois… got to be you, Damballa… When he did sleep, he dreamed of his dead wife, Pauline, and asked her for help too, as he had always done.
A revitalized Garrigue was most concerned the next morning with the problem of destroying a werewolf who had already survived being sliced into pieces, themselves buried in five different counties. “We never going to get another chance like that, not in this city. City, you got to explain why you do somebody in-and you definitely better not say it’s cause he turn into a wolf some nights. Be way simpler if we could just shoot him next full moon, tell them we hunters. Bring him home strap right across the hood, hey Ti-Jean?” He chuckled, thinking about it.
“Except we be changing too,” Arceneaux pointed out. “We all prisoners of the moon, one way another.”
Garrigue nodded. “Yeah, you’d think that’d make us-I don’t know-hold together some way, look out for each other. But it don’t happen, do it? I mean, here I am, and I’m thinking, I ever do get the chance, I’d kill him wolf to wolf, just like he done Sophie. I would, I just don’t give a damn no more.”
“Come to that, it come to that. Last night I been trying to work out how we could pour some cement, make him part of a bridge, an underpass-you know, way the Mafia do. Couldn’t figure it.”
Garrigue said, “You right about one thing, anyway. We can’t be waiting on the moon, cause he sure as hell won’t be. Next full moon gone be short one loup-garou for certain.”
“Maybe two,” Arceneaux said quietly. “Maybe three, even. Man ain’t going quietly no second time.”
“Be worth it.” Garrigue put out his hand and Arceneaux took it, roughness meeting familiar lifelong roughness. Garrigue said, “Just so it ain’t the little ones. Just so he don’t ever get past us to the little ones.” Arceneaux nodded, but did not answer him.
For the next few days they pointedly paid no attention to Duplessis’s presence in the city-though they caught his scent in both neighborhoods, as he plainly made himself familiar with family routines-but spent the time with their children and grandchildren, delighting the latter and relieving the men of babysitting duties. Garrigue, having only sons, got away without suspicions; but neither Noelle nor Arceneaux’s daughter-in-law Athalie were entirely deceived. As Athalie put it, “Women, we are so used to men’s stupid lies, we’re out of practice for a good one, Papajean,” which was her one-word nickname for him. “I know you’re lying, some way, but this one’s really good.”
On Saturday Arceneaux, along with most of his own family, accompanied Garrigue’s family to the Church of Saints Philip and James for Manette Garrigue’s First Communion. The day was unseasonably warm, the group returning for the party large, and at first no one but Arceneaux and Garrigue took any notice of the handsome, well-dressed man walking inconspicuously between them. Alexandre Duplessis said thoughtfully, “What a charming little girl. You must be very proud, Rene.”
Garrigue had been coached half the night, or he would have gone for Duplessis’s throat on the instant. Instead he answered, mildly enough, “I’m real proud of her, you got that right. You lay a hand on her, all Fontenot’s gris-gris be for nothing next time.”
Duplessis seemed not to have heard him. “Should she be the first-not Jean-Marc’s Patrice or Zelime? It’s so hard to decide-”
The strong old arms that blocked Garrigue away also neatly framed Duplessis’s throat. Arceneaux said quietly, “You never going to make it to next moon, Compe’ Alexandre. You know that, don’t you?”
Duplessis looked calmly back at him, the red-brown eyes implacable far beyond human understanding. He said, “Compe’ Jean-Marc, I died at your hands forty and more years ago, and by the time you got through with me I was very, very old. You cannot kill such a man twice, not so it matters.” He smiled at Arceneaux. “Besides, the moon is perhaps not everything, even for a loup-garou. I’d give that a little thought, if I were you.” His canine teeth glittered wetly in the late-autumn sunlight as he turned and walked away.
After a while Noelle dropped back to take her father’s arm. She rubbed her cheek lightly against Arceneaux’s shoulder and said, “Your knee all right? You’re looking tired.”
“Been a long morning.” Arceneaux hugged her arm under his own. “Don’t you worry about the old man.”
“I do, though. Gotten so I worry about you a whole lot. Antoine does, too.” She looked up at him, and he thought, Her mama’s eyes, her mama’s mouth, but my complexion-thank God that’s all she got from me… She said, “How about you spend the night, hey? I make gumbo, you play with the grandbabies, talk sports with Antoine. Sound fair?”
It sounded more than fair; it sounded such a respite from the futile plans and dreaded memories with which he and Garrigue had been living that he could have wept. “I’m gone need take care some business first. Nothing big, just a few bits of business. Then I come back, stay the night.” She prompted him with a silent, quizzical tilt of her head, and he added, “Promise.” It was an old ritual between them, dating from her childhood: he rarely used the word at all, but once he did he could be absolutely relied on to keep it. His grandchildren had all caught on to this somewhat earlier than she had.
He slipped away from the party group without even signaling to Garrigue: a deliberately suspicious maneuver that had the waiting Duplessis behind him before he had gone more than a block from the house. It was difficult to pretend not to notice that he was being followed-this being one of the wolf senses that finds an echo in the human body-but Arceneaux was good at it and took a certain pleasure in leading Duplessis all over the area, as the latter had done to him and Garrigue. But the motive was not primarily spite. He was actually bound for a certain neighborhood botanica run by an old Cuban couple who had befriended him years before, when he first came to the city. They were kind and brown, and spoke almost no English, and he had always suspected that they knew exactly what he was, had known others like him in Cuba, and simply didn’t care.
He spent some forty-five minutes in the crowded little shop, and left with his arms full of brightly-colored packages. Most amounted to herbal and homeopathic remedies of one sort and another; a very few were gifts for Damballa Wedo, whose needs are very simple; and one-the only one with an aroma that would have alerted any loup-garou in the world-was a largish packet of wolfbane.
Still sensing Duplessis on his track, he walked back to Noelle’s house, asked to borrow her car briefly, claiming to have heard an ominous sound from the transmission, and took off northeast, in the direction of the old cabin where he and Garrigue imprisoned themselves one night in every month. The car was as cramped as ever, and the drive as tedious, but he managed it as efficiently as he could. Arriving alone, for the first time ever, he spent s
ome while tidying the cabin, and the yet-raw grave in the woods as well; then carefully measured out all the wolfbane in a circle around the little building, and headed straight back to the city. He bent all his senses, wolf and human alike, to discovering whether or not Duplessis had trailed him the entire way, but the results were inconclusive.
“Way I been figuring it over,” he said to Garrigue the next day, drinking bitter chicory coffee at the only Creole restaurant whose cook understood the importance of a proper roux, “we lured him into that blind pig back on the river, all them years ago, and he just know he way too smart for us to get him like that no second time. So we gone do just exactly what we done before, cause we ain’t but pure-D country, and that the onliest trick we know.” His sigh turned to a weary grunt as he shook his head. “Which ain’t no lie, far as I’m concerned. But we go on paying him no mind, we keep sneaking up there, no moon, no need… he smell the wolfbane, he keep on following us, we got to be planning something… All I’m hoping, Compe’ Rene, I’m counting on a fool staying a fool. The smart ones, they do sometimes.”
Garrigue rubbed the back of his neck and folded his arms. “So what you saying, same thing, except with the cabin? Man, I wouldn’t fall for that, and you know I’m a fool.”
“Yeah, but see, see, we know we fools-we used to it, we live with it like everybody, do the best we can. But Duplessis…” He smiled, although it felt as though he were lifting a great cold weight with his mouth. “Duplessis scary. Duplessis got knowledge you and me couldn’t even spell, never mind understand. He just as smart as he think he is, and we just about what we were back when we never seen a city man before, we so proud to be running with a city man.” He rubbed the bad knee, remembering Sophie’s warnings, not at all comforted by the thought that no one else in the clan had seen through the laughter, the effortless charm, the newness of the young loup-garou who came so persistently courting her. He said, “There’s things Duplessis never going to understand.”
He missed Garrigue’s question, because it was mumbled in so low a tone. He said, “Say what?”
Garrigue asked, “It going to be like that time?” Arceneaux did not answer. Garrigue said, “Cause I don’t think I can do that again, Ti-Jean. I don’t think I can watch, even.” His face and voice were embarrassed, but there was no mistaking the set of his eyes, not after seventy years.
“I don’t know, me.” Arceneaux himself had never once been pursued by dreams of what they had done to Alexandre Duplessis in Sophie’s name; but in forty years he had gently shaken Garrigue out of them more than once, and held him afterward. “We get him there-just you, me, and him, like before-I know then. All I can tell you now, Rene.”
Garrigue made no reply, and they separated shortly afterward. Arceneaux went home, iced his knee, turned on his radio (he had a television set, but rarely watched it), and learned of the discovery of a second homeless woman, eviscerated and partly devoured, her head almost severed from her body by the violence of the attack. The corpse had been found under the Viaduct, barely two blocks from Arceneaux’s apartment, and the police announced that they were taking seriously the disappearance of the woman Arceneaux had buried. Arceneaux sat staring at the radio long after it had switched to broadcasting a college football game.
He called Garrigue, got a busy signal, and waited until his friend called him back a moment later. When he picked up the phone, he said simply, “I know.”
Garrigue was fighting hysteria; Arceneaux could feel it before he spoke the first word. “Can’t be, Ti-Jean. Not full moon. Can’t be.”
“Well,” Arceneaux said. “Gone have to ask old Duplessis what else he sold that Fontenot.” He had not expected Garrigue to laugh, and was not surprised. He said, “Don’t be panicking, you hear me, Rene? Not now. Ain’t the time.”
“Don’t know what else to do.” But Garrigue’s voice was slightly steadier. “If he really be changing any damn time he like-”
“Got to be rules. Le Bon Dieu, he wouldn’t let there not be rules-”
“Then we got to tell them, you hear me? They got to know what out there, what we dealing with-what coming after them-”
“And what we are? What they come from, what they part of? You think your little Manette, my Patrice, you think they ready for that?”
“Not the grandbabies, when I ever said the grandbabies? I’m talking the chirren-yours, mine, they husbands, wives, all them. They old enough, they got a right to know.” There was a pause on the other end, and then Garrigue said flatly, “You don’t tell them, I will. I swear.”
It was Arceneaux’s turn to be silent, listening to Garrigue’s anxious breathing on the phone. He said finally, “Noelle. Noelle got a head on her. We tell her, no one else.”
“She got a husband, too. What about him?”
“Noelle,” Arceneaux said firmly. “Antoine ain’t got no werewolf for a daddy.”
“Okay.” Garrigue drew the two syllables out with obvious dubiousness. “Noelle.” The voice quavered again, sounding old for the first time in Arceneaux’s memory. “Ti-Jean, he could be anywhere right now, we wouldn’t know. Could be at them, be tearing them apart, like that woman-”
Arceneaux stopped him like a traffic cop, literally-and absurdly-with a hand held up. “No, he couldn’t. Think about it, Rene. Back in Louzianne-back then-what we do after that big a kill? What anybody do?”
“Go off… go off somewhere, go to sleep.” Garrigue said it grudgingly, but he said it.
“How long for? How long you ever sleep, you and that full belly?”
“A day, anyway. Slept out two whole days, one time. And old Albert Vaugine…” Garrigue was chuckling a bit, in spite of himself. He said, “Okay, so we maybe got a couple of days-maybe. What then?”
“Then we get ourselves on up to the cabin. You and me and him.” Arceneaux hung up.
It had long been the centerpiece of Arceneaux’s private understanding of the world that nothing was ever as good as you expected it to be, or as bad. His confession of her ancestry to Noelle fell into the latter category. He had expected her reaction to be one of horrified revulsion, followed by absolute denial and tearful outrage. Instead, after withdrawing into silent thought for a time, and then saying slow, mysterious things like, “So that’s why I can never do anything with my hair,” she told him, “You do know there’s no way in the world you’re going without me?”
His response never got much beyond, “The hell you preach, girl!” Noelle set her right forefinger somewhere between his Adam’s apple and his collarbones, and said, “Dadda, this is my fight, too. As long as that man’s running around loose”-the irony of her using the words that Alexandre Duplessis had used to justify his murder of the conjure man Fontenot was not lost on Arceneaux-“my children aren’t safe. You know the way I get about the children.”
“This won’t be no PTA meeting. You don’t know.”
“I know you and Uncle Rene, you may both be werewolves, but you’re old werewolves, and you’re not exactly in the best shape. Oh, you’re going to need me, cause right now the both of you couldn’t tackle Patrice, never mind Zelime.” He was in no state to tackle her, either; he made do with a mental reservation: Look away for even five minutes and we’re out of here, me and Rene. You got to know how to handle daughters, that’s all. Specially the pushy ones.
But on the second day, it didn’t matter, because it was Noelle who was gone. And Patrice with her. And her car.
After Antoine had called the police, and the house had begun to fill with terrified family, but before the reporters had arrived, and before Zelime had stopped crying for her mother and little brother, Arceneaux borrowed his son Celestin’s car. It was quite a bit like renting it, not because Celestin charged him anything, but because answering all his questions about why the loan was necessary almost amounted to filling out a form. Arceneaux finally roared at him, in a voice Celestin had not heard since his childhood, “Cause I’m your father, me, and I just about to snatch you balder than you alr
eady are, you don’t hand me them keys.” He was on the road five minutes later.
He did not stop to pick up Garrigue. His explanation to himself was that there wasn’t time, that every minute was too precious to be taken up with a detour; but even as he made it, he knew better. The truth lay in his pity for Garrigue’s endless nightmares, for his lonesome question, “It gone be like that time?” and for his own sense that this was finally between him and the man whom he had carved to obscene fragments alive. I let him do it all back to me, he lets them two go. Please, Damballa, you hear? Please.
But he was never certain-and less now than ever before-whether Damballa heard prayers addressed to him in English. So for the entire length of the drive, which seemed to take the rest of his life, he chanted, over and over, a prayer-song that little Ti-Jean Arceneaux, who spoke another language, had learned young, never forgotten, and, until this moment, never needed.
“Baba yehge, amiwa saba yehge,
“De Damballa e a miwa,
“Danou sewa yehge o, djevo de.
“De Damballa Wedo, Bade miwa…”
Rather than bursting into the cabin like the avenging angel he had planned to be, he hardly had the strength or the energy to open the car door, once he arrived. The afternoon was cold, and he could smell snow an hour or two away; he noticed a few flakes on the roof of Noelle’s car. There was flickering light in the cabin, and smoke curling from the chimney, which he and Garrigue mistrusted enough that they almost never lighted a fire. He moved closer, noticing two sets of footprints leading to the door. Yeah, she’d have been carrying Patrice, boy’d have been too scared to walk. The vision of his terrified four-year-old grandson made him grind his teeth, and Duplessis promptly called from within, “No need to bite the door down, Jean-Marc. Half a minute, I’ll be right there.”
Waiting, Arceneaux moved to the side of the house and ripped down the single power line. The electric light went out inside, and he heard Duplessis laugh. Standing on the doorstep as Arceneaux walked back, he said, “I thought you might do that, so I built a handsome fire for us all-even lit a few candles. But if you imagine that’s going to preclude the use of power tools, I feel I should remind you that they all run on batteries these days. Nice big batteries. Come in, Jean-Marc, I bid you welcome.”
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