Billy stared at Uncle Conch for almost a minute before he could answer. “You were in Haiti when we were growing up,” he said. “Cooter and me were always getting kicked around, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. Tell me.”
“I don’t know…I saw Haiti on the news and stuff. I know that you guys had it worse down there than we had here…”
“Poor is poor is poor,” said Uncle Conch. “Kid starving in the street don’t measure his hunger ‘gainst some other kid he never met. Kid still hungry. Kid still cries when he hungry.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t just that. Cooter’s mom was pretty cool—she was your daughter?”
Uncle Conch shook his head. “My sister’s daughter. Only one of us to leave Haiti in a hundred years.”
“Until you.”
The old man shook his head. “I live here, boy, but I ain’t ever left Haiti. Haiti is home. I’m a Boukman—you know what that mean?”
Billy shook his head.
“My many-times-great granddaddy was Dutty Boukman, a houngan from Jamaica who settled in Haiti. Let me tell you what a houngan is,” said Uncle Conch. “That’s a sorcerer, a priest of the old religion. Dutty led the first slave revolt in Haiti. He that strong. He that fierce a man. Once Dutty shucked off his chains no man could put them back on again. Them French they had to shoot him a hundred times to bring Dutty Boukman down. Why so many times? Because Dutty was filled with the loa of Kalfu—and that is one powerful spirit. Kalfu is the loa of the crossroads and every slave who ever died had to stand before that spirit and tell Kalfu how they died and who killed them. Kalfu got so angry he looked for the right man, the right slave, to open a doorway in his soul, to let him come through. That’s what Dutty Boukman did. Dutty’s heart was so filled with hate for the slavers that he opened up the door in his soul and let Kalfu come walking through. Oh, now Kalfu is not Casper. You know Casper, the friendly ghost? Like on TV? No, Kalfu not like that. Kalfu controls all the evil forces of the spirit world. He bring bad luck and hard justice. Dutty was filled with that dark magic and when he told all the other slaves to rise up, they rise up. That was 1791. By 1794 slavery was abolished in Haiti. That’s how strong Dutty Boukman was. That’s the blood that flows right pass the crossroads. The river of dark blood that flows over the years from him to me.” He paused and sadness filled his eyes. “And to Cooter. And that river of blood end with Cooter, but it don’t make the little boy strong. All that river did was wash him away, and up in heaven his mama is singing a sad song.”
The birds in the trees seemed to echo that music.
“I live here, but Haiti is in me.” Uncle Conch touched his chest. “When I die here, my soul will be buried in Haiti.”
Billy nodded. That was something he could understand. “Cooter and me always wanted to find a place that we could call home. My mom died when I was two, so I never got to know her. Cancer. Sucks, but I was over Cooter’s all the time. His mom was so great, you know? She was always singing songs.”
“Little Bird,” said Uncle Conch, and there was a smile buried down inside the wrinkles on his face. Sad and deep and real. “That’s what we called her. Little Songbird.”
“She was great. She was the best. But…you know, she died, too. A bus hit her. I mean, how random and fucked up is that? How does God allow a bus to hit someone like her? Fucking bus should have hit my dad. Or Cooter’s dad. Those two assholes should have had a fleet of busses hit them. Fuckers.”
Uncle Conch nodded. “I didn’t know that about her husband. Not until I get a letter and she tell me. I was putting money together to come here and talk to that man when I get the other letter. ‘Bout the bus.”
They sat and thought about it.
“You didn’t come, though,” said Billy. It wasn’t an accusation. He was putting it out there to see what it looked like.
Uncle Conch nodded. “I didn’t come. Not till after the quake.”
“Yeah.”
“I think the quake was a judgment on me.”
Billy looked at him. “What?”
“The loa—they know what kind of man I am.”
“Cooter said you were a priest, too,” said Billy. “They said in your village back on the island people thought you could do magic and stuff. Tell the future, cure all sorts of diseases and raise dead people. He said you were a good guy.”
The words were kindly meant, but Uncle Conch looked sad. “What Cooter know? All he knows is what his mama, Little Songbird, tell him, and what she know? Over here her whole life, just hearing ‘bout things in letters. No…it’s the loa who know the truth. They know that I carry Boukman blood—hero blood—and they know I studied the ways of the houngan, but they also know I ain’t done much with it ‘cept make myownself happy. Drink and pussy and some deviltry to make the long nights scream. Yeah, you can fool your family but you can’t fool the loa.” He paused and Billy did not interrupt. “Maybe I’m a bad man, white boy. Maybe I’m a bad man like Cooter’s dad. Like your dad.”
Billy said nothing.
But then Uncle Conch shook his head. “No, not like those cockroaches. I don’t put my hand on a woman and I don’t put my hand on a baby. Even so…I’m a bad man. I done bad things.” He nodded to the rhythm of his own thoughts. “Haiti a bad place. Hard place to be a good man. Easy place for a bad man to be a bad man. Bad is more fun.”
“I—”
Uncle Conch laughed. A deep, rumbling laugh that had no humor in it. “Don’t worry, white boy, I ain’t going to do bad things to you.”
“You weren’t bad to Cooter.”
The old man sighed and ran his fingers along the outside of the brass urn. “I wasn’t good to him, neither.”
“You paid his bills, man. You gave him a place to live.”
Uncle Conch turned and looked at the charred walls behind him. “All I gave that boy is a place to die, and I think he was dead before they cooked him in there.”
But Billy shook his head. “No, man, that’s just it. Cooter and me…we could always get free. We could get away anytime we liked.”
The old man’s brows knitted. “How? How you and my Cooter get free?”
When Billy didn’t answer, the old man nodded.
“The pipe,” said Uncle Conch.
“I guess.”
“That got you away?”
“Yeah.”
“All the way away?”
Billy thought about it. “At first, yeah.”
“What happened at first?”
“At first, man, we’d light a pipe and take one hit and we were gone. Really gone. We were flying.” He closed his eyes to summon the memory, and his body swayed as if he was gliding on the winds, riding the thermals, high above it all. “That’s how we escaped, man.”
“Escaped?”
“Cooter’s dad. Mine. When Cooter’s dad went to jail, we sailed so high that night. Oh, god, we were all the way up. Flying like birds.”
When he opened his eyes, Uncle Conch was not looking at him. Instead he was studying the soot-blackened flamingos.
“That why you got these birds all over the lawn?”
Billy sniffed back more tears. “That was Cooter’s idea. He said that maybe if we got high enough we’d fly way up in the sky, like the flamingos. You ever see them? They soar up there, not a care in the world, just floating on the wind like nothing beneath them matters. Nobody can touch them up there. They’re so high. And so free.” He looked at the melted wings of the pink plastic birds. “Now Cooter’s gone and all the flamingos are dead. Cooked, man. It’s all cooked.”
A sob broke in Billy’s chest and he hugged his ribs with bandaged hands as he wept for Cooter.
Uncle Conch laid a hand on Billy’s trembling shoulder.
“Why’d they have to do that?” sobbed Billy. “Why’d they have to do all that? So we stole their yard stuff. So we took some stupid pink birds and stupid gnomes and that other stuff. If they were mad about it, most they should have done was mess us up a little. T
hey done that plenty of times. All they had to do was knock us around a little and take their stuff back. And, look, man, they didn’t even take their shit. All that stuff’s still here. What was it all about, man? What’s the point of anything if they didn’t even take their stuff back?”
He kept crying and his voice crumbled beneath the weight of it. The only word he could manage was, “Cooter…”
Then Uncle Conch bent close and whispered in his ear.
“Now you listen to me, boy,” he said, “I told you once that I’m a houngan and the blood of Dutty Boukman run through my veins. Told you that my many-times grandfather got so mad, so damn mad, that he opened up a door in his soul and let something evil come right on through.”
“Kalfu,” said Billy.
“The loa Kalfu, lord of the crossroads, bringer of hard justice.” Uncle Conch picked up the urn. “I just ‘bout pissed on everything good there was in the Boukman name. I left my Little Songbird to get knocked around by a weak, bad man. I let her boy die trying to fly away from this shithole. I done that. I could have changed it, but I didn’t, so I done that.”
Billy shook his head, but Uncle Conch was staring at the urn. He opened it and looked at the soft gray nothing that was Cooter.
“I done this,” he murmured. “I got no one else alive on this earth who is blood kin to me. The Boukman name, proudest blood of my people, dies when I die. And if I die this moment, right now, then that blood turns to piss that ain’t worth hosing off the street.”
He drew a long breath.
“But I got me a little breath left and a little blood yet, and I got me a heart that is so full of hate that it wants to burst open and break the world. So what you think I should do?”
Billy said nothing. His eyes were huge and round.
“You ‘member Cooter said I could magic, white boy. Pretend I’m a genie in a bottle and you can ask one wish. What that wish going to be?”
Billy looked at the urn and down at the melted flamingos and then up at the endless blue sky. “I guess I’d want two wishes,” he said.
“What wishes, boy?”
“I’d want to see Cooter again. He’s my best friend, you know? He’s the greatest, Cooter’s the king. I’d want to see him again. Not with burns on him, though. Like he was yesterday morning. Laughing and happy, singing to himself like the way his mom used to. That’s what I’d wish for.”
A tear broke from Uncle Conch’s eye and wandered over the million seams and lines in the old man’s face, burning like hot silver.
“And what’s your second wish? You want me to burn those boys who burned Cooter? You want me to raise the devils of hell to burn them? Or how about I call the loas of vengeance and we turn these melted gnomes into a pack of monsters to hunt that pack of monsters. I could do that. That’s dark magic. I call Kalfu and I could do that.”
But Billy shook his head. “No…if I only had one more wish after that, I’d want Cooter and me to fly out of here. Far away. Like flamingos, but not melted ones. Not fly like we’re smoking ice, but really fly. All the way into the sky. That would be the shit, man. That’s what Cooter would want.”
Uncle Conch stared at Billy for a long, long time.
“That’s all you want? You can have all the revenge you want and instead you want to fly away with my Cooter like a couple of birds?”
Billy closed his eyes.
“Big pink flamingos, man. So high…so free…”
-5-
Billy thought he said more to Uncle Conch, but he couldn’t hear his own words. Another sob hitched his shoulders.
But it wasn’t a sob, of course. He knew that. When he opened his eyes, he knew that much.
Far, far below the Passaic River curved along the edge of Newark, but from up here it looked like a blue ribbon. Billy turned to say something to Uncle Conch, but it wasn’t the old man. It was Cooter. Big and pink and riding free. Billy called out to him, but his voice sounded different. It didn’t sound like his voice. And it didn’t sound wrong. It sounded right. It sounded too right.
Billy closed his eyes and he laughed in that strange new voice as he and Cooter flew free.
-6-
Uncle Conch took his time getting to his feet. He was old but parts of him were even older, used up before their time. He braced himself on his cane and began lumbering toward his car.
In his chest, his heart hammered like old drums. Fast, insistent, powerful. Pain darted up and down his left arm.
But he hummed as he walked to his car. He knew that he wasn’t going to die in the next five minutes. Not that soon. When he got to the curb he turned and looked at the debris in the yard. The flamingos were gone, and that made him smile. For just a moment. It would be the last of Uncle Conch’s smiles to touch that face.
Then his eyes fell on the little singed and half-melted gnomes. Nasty looking little things. Stupid things. White man’s idea of what looked good on a man’s lawn.
The eyes that looked on the gnomes were Uncle Conch’s for one blink longer. Then with the next blink the eyes changed from dark brown to fiery red. The smile on the old mouth changed, became broader, brighter. No longer the pained smile of a dying man but the vital smile of something far more powerful. In his chest the old heart began hammering to a rhythm that was many times older than the body around it. A rhythm many times older than the pavement beneath the scuffed shoes. Many times older than the country in which he stood. As old as hate, and that was so very old.
“Rise up, my brother spirits,” said the voice that was no longer Uncle Conch’s. Nor was the language English, or French, or Creole.
On the lawn, there was a small sound, a tiny groan, a rasp of plastic. One of the lawn gnomes raised its singed and sooty head. The white beard was streaked with ash, the eyes were melted holes. The mouth was stamped into the plastic. But then the plastic lips trembled and the whole body trembled with effort and finally there was a popping noise as the mouth opened. Broken, twisted plastic in a zigzag gash. The little creature smiled, and its wide and wicked grin was exactly the same as what was now stretched across Uncle Conch’s mouth. The mouth that had belonged to Uncle Conch, when there had been an Uncle Conch.
“Rise up, brother spirits,” repeated Kalfu, using Uncle Conch’s borrowed mouth. Each word was exhaled on a hot breath that blew through the open door of hate in the ancient body. “They are serving dinner on Seventh Avenue. White meat, served rare. All you can eat.”
One by one the melted gnomes opened empty eyes and ripped open jagged mouths. Hungry mouths. They rose unsteadily to their feet, tottering toward the open car door beside which Kalfu, their brother, waited.
Author’s Note on “The Death Poem of Sensei Ōtoro”
Sometimes a story waits patiently in a writer’s head until the right moment for it to be written. This is one of those. And it involves several of my favorite elements—weird history, horror, action, and martial arts—particularly the sword arts of the Samurai. I’ve been a lifelong practitioner of Japanese martial arts and have always wanted to write a tale set in Feudal Japan. This is it.
The Death Poem of Sensei Ōtoro
-Ichi-
Ōtoro knelt by the doorway to contemplate the cherry blossoms as the late afternoon breeze dusted them from the branches. The courtyard was a softly rippling sea of white and pink.
“Beautiful,” he murmured.
The servant girl came and poured more tea and the fragrance of jasmine perfumed the air. He nodded his thanks but did not touch the cup until she was gone. Ōtoro didn’t know this girl and didn’t like her furtive looks. Might be curiosity—everyone was curious about a stranger until they knew the story—and it might be suspicion. Anyone who was not suspicious in these times was a fool; but suspicion could have so many meanings. He kept his sword hand on his thigh until she had closed the door and her soft footsteps had vanished down the hall.
In the courtyard of the inn blossoms fell like silent tears from the trees. Ōtoro sipped his tea. It was a litt
le too strong; the girl had hoped to impress him with its scent so that he wouldn’t notice that she’d over-brewed it. He took a second sip and set the cup aside.
Beyond the holly hedge he saw the tops of two heads bobbing their way toward him. Ōtoro considered the angle of the sun. They were right on time and he appreciated promptness. The two men emerged from behind the holly, paused to orient themselves, saw the open door and angled that way. The older man was Ito, a daimyo of considerable wealth and connections; his young companion was unknown to Ōtoro.
Ito was perhaps sixty, in fine silks, the other less than half his age in less expensive clothes. Both wore two swords—it confirmed what Ōtoro had learned about Ito, that he was a traditional Samurai, a devout Buddhist rather than a Christian. The Christians did not carry the shorter sword, the wakazashi, as it was against their religion to commit seppuku, even when faced with a loss of honor. Ōtoro disliked and distrusted this spreading departure from the values by which his family had lived for centuries, though he was realistic enough to accept that some changes were inevitable. Europe was closing its fist around Japan and eventually even the age of the samurai would pass.
One day, he knew; but it was a day he would never live to see. Like the samurai culture itself, his time was nearly over.
The visitors drew closer. Ito walked with casual confidence, his companion affected a gamecock strut. They came to the edge of the courtyard and the younger man strode forward, body erect as a statue, his gait that of an experienced but arrogant veteran. The young man made as if to keep walking but Ito stopped him with an arm across his chest. The older man looked out across the unbroken sea of cherry blossom petals and his face changed from a purposeful frown to a softer look, eyes scanning the color, lips parting slightly. The younger man just looked past the beauty to where Ōtoro sat.
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