Brown Girl In the Ring (18 page)

“So, if killing come in like cool breeze to you, why you ain’t help we?” Anger. That’s what she should be feeling now, not this vague, distanced resentment. “Why you ain’t do for Rudy?”

“I could only do what Daddy order me to do,” her mother replied. “If he hadn’t tell me to come here to watch and make sure Tony carry out he orders, I couldn’t even self pass the door. And to talk to allyou, I had was to come back inside my body. When I do that, is like having a fit. It does take time for body and mind to come back together again. That’s why I couldn’t warn Mami in time. I do what I could, doux-doux. I not going to be able to fight Tony for you,” Mi-Jeanne said. Her voice lowered in shame. “Truth is, I supposed to kill Tony, but only after he kill you.”

“Oh, is so it go?” Ti-Jeanne replied. Her world had frayed into tattered threads. She felt almost detached as she listened to herself calmly discuss her own murder with her long-lost mother. “Let Tony come then, nuh?” Ti-Jeanne said to her. “Bastard. Say we going to move from here. Say we going to settle down. I go shoot he lying mouth right off he worthless face.”

“If you did have to see what Tony watch Rudy do, you woulda be same way. After you see what Rudy capable of, you would do anything he tell you, so you don’t end up on that table, feeling Rudy knife strip the skin from off your body.”

Ti-Jeanne’s body went cold. Was this what she was up against? Her knees wouldn’t hold her. She sat down hard on the bed. Mi-Jeanne must have felt the mattress give. She groped along the bed until she found Ti-Jeanne’s leg. She held it hard and continued: “Feeling he slit your throat, Ti-Jeanne. Feeling your lifeblood running into he duppy bowl for the monster inside to drink. For
me
to drink, Ti-Jeanne. Is that Tony see last night. You have to free me. You have to find Daddy duppy bowl and break it.”

Ti-Jeanne pulled away from her mother’s grasp. She got up and continued searching through Mami’s belongings. “Allyou ain’t want plenty, oui?” Her tone was bitter. Good. It would hide her fright. “Mami want me to turn bush doctor; Tony want me to dead; you want me to save your wicked soul. What I go help you for? After you abandon me from small?”

She heard Baby’s thin, hungry cry from the other bedroom. Her milk let down at the sound, dampening the front of her shirt. “God, not now, child. You ain’t see I busy?”

Busy. Ti-Jeanne almost laughed at the inadequacy of the word.

“Turn around, Ti-Jeanne,” said Tony from the doorway, in the voice of someone who had looked into hell and seen his own face. “Turn around so I can see your hands.”

Holding up her empty palms, she turned to face Tony. His face was swollen with weeping, but he looked determined. He had a gun of his own pointed at her. He kept glancing back and forth between her and her mother. “I have to do this, Ti-Jeanne. After what you did to Crack and Jay and Crapaud, Rudy wants you out of the way.”

“It wasn’t me. Is Legbara do it. You saw.”

“Don’t give me that! You and Gros-Jeanne been playing me from the start!”

“For what, Tony?” Mi-Jeanne asked sadly. “You ain’t see how the two of them been trying to stay out of posse business? You is Ti-Jeanne baby father, but she leave you when she realise that posse more important to you than she. Man, even your own baby does cry when it see you coming.”

That startled Ti-Jeanne. She hadn’t thought of it that way. Mi-Jeanne was right. Every time she had started to get close to Tony again, Baby had demanded her attention.

“Too late for everything now,” Mi-Jeanne said sadly. “Ti-Jeanne, I sorry. The only way to prevent me from doing what Rudy tell me is to break the duppy calabash and free my spirit. And you not go get to do that now.” She stood up, looking in the direction of Tony’s voice. “Tony, none of we ain’t want nothing to do with you. So do your business, or don’t do it. Is all the same to me. Daddy say I must kill you either way. Stop me if you could stop me, nuh?”

She took a step toward him. He swung the gun in her direction. “Stay there,” he ordered her. She ignored him. She kept walking.

“Tony, don’t shoot,” Ti-Jeanne said. He risked a glance at her, swung the gun back at her. Mi-Jeanne reached him. She touched his arm. He turned and shot her full in the chest.

“No!” Ti-Jeanne’s calm vanished. “Mummy!”

Mi-Jeanne fell like a sack of bones. A red mist rose from her crumpled body. Ravening jaws, mad eyes, and clawing hands swirled in it. It slammed Tony to the floor. He screamed. The gun discharged into the ceiling.

The thing sat on Tony’s chest, gibbering. Almost lovingly it licked his cheek. A strip of skin came away at its touch, disappeared into the swirling mass. The thing made a harrowing moan of pleasure. Terrified, Tony batted and clawed at it, but his hands just wafted through it and came away bloody.

“La Diablesse. Soucouyant,” Ti-Jeanne muttered. This was her nightmare. Her own mother. And it was up to her to stop Mi-Jeanne. She threw herself to the ground, level with the duppy, and shouted, “Mummy! Stop this! Stop now!”

For answer, the duppy dove at her face. Ti-Jeanne pulled back just in time. The hot wind of its attack swept by, millimetres from her cheek. Three of her plaits fell to the ground, sheared off clean. Her mother’s duppy had no choice. It was bound to do what Rudy told it to do. “Mummy, wait,” Ti-Jeanne begged hopelessly.

To her surprise, the duppy held off for a moment. It was like watching a hurricane rage in a small space. Ti-Jeanne had the impression of a frenzied howling, although she heard nothing. But the duppy’s claws were already scrabbling at Tony’s whimpering throat. Its daughter’s plea held it for now, but in a second it would have to do its master’s bidding.
It had to do what Rudy said.
Ti-Jeanne thought fast, opened her mouth before she quite knew what she was going to say.

“Rudy tell you to kill we, yes?”

The maddened red eyes seemed to agree with her.

“But he ain’t tell you
when,
Mummy, and he ain’t tell you
where
? Ain’t?”

Had the duppy’s crazed swirling slowed down a little? Desperately Ti-Jeanne started talking again, hoping that some kind of plan would emerge from her babbling. “That’s right, that’s right. You could take we anywhere, kill we there, you still go be doing what Rudy tell you. Right, Mummy?”

The duppy’s claws pulled back from Tony’s neck. It seemed to be waiting for Ti-Jeanne to say more. What could she say that would draw out their lives a little more, give them a chance?

“You want, you want me to…free you, ain’t it? Find Rudy dead bowl and break it, so you don’t have to kill no more? Well, take we there before you kill we. Take we to Rudy place.”

Tony grabbed her wrist. His eyes were wide. “Woman, like you mad, or what?”

She felt his grip warm on her skin and looked into the eyes of this man she had loved beyond sense or reason. She thought of her grandmother’s body lying there with its head broken in, looked at Mi-Jeanne’s cooling body lying beside them on the ground.

“Yes, I mad,” she answered him, firmly pulling her wrist from his grasp. She stood up. The duppy lifted itself off Tony’s chest and coalesced into a red fireball. It hovered above them, waiting. “I mad like France,” Ti-Jeanne said. “Mad like that old woman jumbie thing who used to be my mother. I mad at all of allyou for making me run around trying to save allyou, but allyou just digging yourselves in deeper, each one in he own pit.”

“But Ti-Jeanne,” Tony protested, getting to his feet, “you can’t go to Rudy’s. He’ll just kill you. What’s that going to help?”

“I tell you, I going. But me ain’t business with what you want to do, oui? You could try to run away again, I guess. But I bet you the duppy go find you.”

Tony’s eyes slid to the fireball that was now tracing an impatient, sizzling orbit in the air.

“Mummy,” Ti-Jeanne addressed it, “let me just go get the baby. He hungry. I could feed he while we walk.”

The fireball moved out of the way. Refusing to look at the body of her mother lying on the floor, Ti-Jeanne went into her own room to get Baby; Tony and the fireball followed her as if attached to her apron strings. She stared down at her child in his crib. Leave him here alone, perhaps to starve to death, or take him with them? Baby looked at her, reached for her. Another life tied to her apron strings. She picked him up, put him into his Snugli, and slung it onto her body. “Let we go then, nuh?”

The strange procession filed down the stairs and out into the night.

Mi-Jeanne’s body was dead. If Ti-Jeanne did manage to free her mother’s soul from the calabash, where would it go now?

T
he operation was routine. It was their patient who was unusual. Margaret Wright was well aware that she was known for being an unflappable surgeon. During the next few hours, that reputation would be at stake. The media were following Premier Uttley’s heart transplant like hawks. They were expecting Dr. Wright to give a news conference as soon as she was out of the operating room. And they’d be talking to everyone who’d been in the OR, too. Every move Dr. Wright made would be on a newscast within hours. If she had snapped at a nurse, if she had made a crooked suture, all of Canada would know.

Nothing could go wrong. She wouldn’t allow it. She had to make sure that her patient was smiling for the camera within days.

Everything was going fine so far. Uttley had already received a portion of her donor’s bone marrow. Uttley’s leucocytes had not attacked the donor marrow; that was a good sign. When Wright transplanted the heart, white blood cells from Uttley’s bone marrow should migrate smoothly into the foreign organ, and vice versa, a chimerism that would trick her immune system into accepting the foreign organ so that body and heart could coexist peacefully.

Now it was time for the transplant.

Prepped for the surgery, Dr. Wright watched Dr. Fang do his part on the unconscious form of Premier Uttley. The surgical resident had never seen this operation done with a human heart. Wright knew that he wanted to be as involved as possible.

The ventilator was already breathing for Uttley. Her entire body was covered in sterile white sheets, leaving exposed only her chest area: the surgical field. As always, the area of flesh that Wright could see didn’t look human. Best that way. Now was not the time for the people in the OR to focus on who their patient was. They needed to concentrate on what they were doing. Don Fang and Jim Nesbit, Wright’s associate surgeon, had already cut through the sternum and pried open the ribs with chest spreaders. They freed Uttley’s heart from its pericardial sac. Nesbit leaned closer to inspect the heart.

“Hang on, Jim,” Wright said to him. “Let me get a look, too.” Jim made room for her. Yes. A clear case of cardiomyopathy. The flabby, distended sack that Uttley’s heart had become was about twice the size it should have been. It beat sluggishly.

Jim made a “tsk, tsk” noise. “Whoo. Not a moment too soon, eh?”

“Yup. Let’s get that baby out of there.”

Wright stepped back out of the way. Jim sutured the ascending aorta and the right atrium, cannulated, injected the heparin to prevent blood clotting. Then he connected Uttley to the heart-lung bypass machine. He made the last few cuts and lifted Uttley’s heart out of her chest cavity. The perfusionist and the anaesthesiologist checked their readouts. Doing fine.

“Okay, Margaret.”

Dr. Wright stepped up to her place at the operating table. She took a deep breath, looked at the faces around her. “Here we go, guys.” She lifted the donor heart from its basin of sterile fluid. Through her gloves, it felt firm and chilled from having been kept cold.

“So that’s what a healthy human ticker looks like,” muttered Dr. Fang. “Not so different from pig hearts.”

“That’s all we are,” Jim chuckled. “Long pig.”

Fang asked, “How old did they say the donor was?”

“Fifty-seven,” Wright replied. “A bit old for this, maybe, but we were getting desperate, and she was healthy as a horse. Pathology says she never smoked, looked like she worked hard all her life, had arteries as soft as a baby’s. Suction, Jim.”

As Jim suctioned the excess blood from the chest cavity, Wright lowered the heart in.
Straightforward stuff,
she told herself. Nevertheless, she anxiously reviewed the procedure aloud. She told herself it was for the benefit of her team. “Four anastomoses: fuse donor heart’s left atrial to patient’s left atrium; join the two right atrials; attach donor aorta to patient’s aorta; attach pulmonary arteries.”

Jim looked at her over his mask. He knew all this, had worked with her hundreds of times. She took another breath for calm and positioned the heart.

“Bonding stylus,” Jim said. The nurse handed him the pen—the “glue gun,” they called it—that would fuse the ends of the blood vessels together with fine lines of a nontoxic organic binder. The cellular growth factors suspended in the binder would promote accelerated healing.

Jim started beading the first join line. Wright maintained pressure on the join as he went.

First line done. Wright poured a bucket of ice-cold sterile saline solution on the heart. Jim finished bonding the left atrium, started on the right. Fang moved in closer to observe what he was doing. As a resident in training, he had to learn every step of the operation.