Brown Girl In the Ring (23 page)

“’Bout one forty, boss,” Barry replied. “And hard, too, you see? No fat on she bones.” He gave her a slimy grin.

“I hope you did enjoy feeling me up,” Ti-Jeanne taunted him. “For I go be the last woman you touch. I is a seer woman, and I
dream
it.”

Lies, pure lies, but she had the small satisfaction of seeing a look of doubt and unease creep over Barry’s face. “Shut up,” he told her.

“You go make me?”

He released her arm, hauled back his hand, and slapped her face hard. Stunned, she nevertheless swung out with her free arm, felt it connect with his jaw.

“Ow! Bitch!”

“Barry!” Rudy’s voice still had the sound of command, although it shook with the weight of the years that had fallen on him in seconds. “Mind me, man! If you only get me vex tonight, me will take you out and shoot you myself. Just hold she. And ignore what she say.” Barry sucked his teeth but grabbed her arm again, slamming it down to the table harder than was necessary.

Not to think, not to think. Instinct alone.
Ti-Jeanne had been using the words as a mantra ever since she had set out for Rudy’s this night. But her heart was trying to fight its way out of her chest. If she were truly to obey her instincts, she would be begging for mercy, promising anything, if only the three men would let her go free. She bit her lips and just breathed, in and out. The need for breath was a deeper instinct than even fear.

“Hold she good now, Crack,” Rudy instructed the man restraining her legs. No need to reinforce the order. Crack’s grip on her was already hideously strong, his fingers digging into each leg just above the knee. But she would not cry, she would not speak.

Rudy picked up the butcher knife, turned it from side to side, inspecting it.

Ti-Jeanne found she couldn’t keep her promise of silence. “What you going to do?” She followed the glinty twists of the knife with her eyes, unable to look away from it.

“Let in the poison, my darling,” quavered Rudy. He picked up one of her plaits, gently touched the knife to it. The blade sliced clean through. “You ever slash buff, granddaughter?”

“Uh-uh.” Her voice came out high and childish. She would not cry, she would not beg.

“Is Haiti people first make it, you nah know? From poison toad and some herbs. Bufo toad. Is that name that buff come from.” He rotated the phial in front of her face. Crazily, all she could think was what a beautiful shade of blue they were.

Rudy picked up the rubber gloves he had placed on the table and snapped them onto his hands. Even through the gloves it was obvious how veined and arthritic they were. He scowled at them.

There was another measured phial on the table, a molasses-thick liquid. He carefully poured a measure of it into the buff crystals, using one hand to still the tremors in the other. “When people slash buff,” he said, swirling the phial to mix the two substances, “them only use little bit, cut it with crack. It make them feel say them flying. We go give you a different mixture of it, though. Buff with some other Haiti medicine mix in. You know what buff does do you, Ti-Jeanne?”

“Nerve and muscle paralysant,” she whispered through clenched teeth. She’d seen the deceptively relaxed bodies of people who’d OD’d on buff.

“Yes, my darling. Your grandmammy teach you good. So you know why I have to be careful how much you get. Nah want your heart and lungs to stop working, right? Want you to be awake and know what we a-do to you. And the other things I mix in? They go lower your emotional resistance, make you more suggestible. For you see that paralysis, Ti-Jeanne? Is the first stage in making a zombie.”

Then he took the knife and slowly made a deep incision in the meat of her thigh muscle. Ti-Jeanne arched her back as the knife traced a line of agony up her leg. The trembling of his hand made the pain even worse. The grunting sounds issuing past her teeth weren’t sobs, not quite.

“It stinging you, nuh? Good. I coulda give a injection, but I want you to feel me make the cut. For all the trouble you cause me today.” She tried desperately to heave herself free of the restraining arms, but it was no use. Rudy poured some crystals from the phial into the gash on her leg, checked the level in the container, poured some more. Then he used his thumb to work the mixture deeply into the wound. Her leg began to go numb immediately. With every beat of her heart, the poison was moving deeper into her body.

“Yes, the first stage for making a zombie. Combine the paralysis and the suggestibility with the right kind of um,
indoctrination,
and the zombie go do anything me tell it. Sometimes me want little help ’round here, you understand? To keep the place clean and so.”

Both legs were numb now. An eerie sensation of cold creeped over Ti-Jeanne’s trunk as the superficial nerves went dead.

“A zombie can’t do nothing complicated,” Rudy continued, “but if you tell it to wash the dishes, it go wash every dish in the place.”

“Clean ones and all,” Crack sniggered, “if you don’t say different.” Rudy smirked at the comment. Ti-Jeanne found she couldn’t turn her head.

“Sometimes me only want to teach somebody a lesson. Like that Melba, holding back some of she earnings from me. But for you, sweetness,” Rudy said, holding her by the chin to look deeply into her eyes, “me have more than that in store for you. If you could convince a spirit from out a dead body to serve you, then you nah have to fear nothing again. Not enemies, not bullets, not age, not death. The duppy could kill your enemies, trap them souls in it duppy bowl, if you want. It could stop bullets, eat death. If you only have the balls to kill somebody and trap their soul in bowl to serve you. Is Legbara tell me that.”

Not Legbara!
Ti-Jeanne tried to shout.
Him woulda never tell you how to do this!
But all that came from her flaccid mouth was a vague, grunting noise.

“Stupid spirit.” Rudy chuckled. “Him think say I woulda find that so horrible, I wouldn’t do it. Him think wrong.”

He slapped Ti-Jeanne in the face, right where Barry had just hit her. She felt involuntary tears start to her eyes. She couldn’t blink them away.

“And I come to find out something him nah tell me. A duppy from a dead somebody not too smart. Smarter than a zombie, but you still can’t give it nothing too complicated to do, seen? But if you split off the duppy from it body while the body still alive! Well, then you have a servant for true. One that could teach you everything it did know in life. You know your mother was a seer woman, right?”

He slapped the other side of her face. “Ah, like you ain’t feel that one, granddaughter?” She hadn’t. Her head had rocked to the side with the force of the blow, but there was no pain. Her tears flowed freely for her mother and for the man who had trapped his own daughter’s soul in a container so that he would never have to die.

“All right, she ready now,” said Rudy. “Let we start.”

Start?
She had thought they’d already started.

They lifted her inert body from the table to the floor. She couldn’t help but see what they were doing. She couldn’t control the muscles that would close her eyes. Rudy produced an old, fire-blackened knife, on the blade of which he heaped a few mounds of some kind of powder. “Gunpowder,” he said conversationally to her. “Me know say your body can’t speak, but when your spirit agree to serve me, this gunpowder go burst into flames. The body could lie, but when your spirit ready to accept my bond, it go tell me true.” They put her in a black sack. She could smell the white rum that was being sprinkled on it. Some of it dripped through the sack and made her open eyes burn.

She heard Rudy grunt as he eased his old body onto the ground by her head. Then he spoke to her once more. “Ti-Jeanne? Me know say you could hear me, granddaughter.” Coming from Rudy’s lips, the word “granddaughter” sounded as obscene as a curse. Ti-Jeanne prayed that he’d given her too much of the bufo poison, that her heart would stop of its own accord. But she remained stubbornly alive.

“I go tell you a little something, Ti-Jeanne.” His voice sounded companionable, as though they were sharing an intimate secret, just between the two of them. “Is your mother sheself ask me to put she duppy in the bowl.”

You lie,
Ti-Jeanne thought.

“A-true, me tell you,” Rudy said. “Mi-Jeanne come running to me for help. Your grandmother did putting visions in she head, trying to control she. Trying to make Mi-Jeanne stay with she. Making she see things to frighten she.”

Ti-Jeanne remembered that night so many years ago when her mother had woken up screaming. Mi-Jeanne hadn’t wanted Mami’s comforting. She and Mami had been arguing a lot. Dunston had moved in and Mi-Jeanne was talking about leaving, taking Ti-Jeanne and finding their own place to live.

Rudy’s words echoed in Ti-Jeanne’s head. Maybe he was telling the truth, and Mami was at the root of all their problems. Maybe Mami had tried the same trick on both Ti-Jeanne and Mi-Jeanne; caused the visions and made them feel that their only chance for being rid of them was to stay with her and receive her help. Ti-Jeanne was confused. The drug made it hard to breathe, hard to think clearly. Rudy’s voice came again:

“Think about it little more, sweetheart. You nah see the power I did give Mi-Jeanne? Knife couldn’t cut she, blows couldn’t lick she, love couldn’t leave she, heart couldn’t hurt she. She coulda go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.”

His voice flowed soothingly over her.
Heart couldn’t hurt she.
What if Tony hadn’t been able to slide into Ti-Jeanne’s heart like a thorn from a rose and stick there, aching and aching? She probably wouldn’t have got pregnant. There would be no Baby constantly demanding her attention and her energy.
She coulda go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.
Suppose she could have chosen her own way, instead of trying to tear herself in three to satisfy Tony, and Baby, and Mami?

“Mi-Jeanne beg me to help she live only in she spirit, for she didn’t want the pains of the body no more. The only part of she flesh that she take into that calabash with she was she eyes, so she could see for me. She gouge them out sheself and put them in the duppy bowl, Ti-Jeanne.”

Ti-Jeanne’s mind reeled at the image of Mi-Jeanne digging her own eyes out of her head. She must have been desperate to become a duppy!

“And, granddaughter,” came Rudy’s soft whisper, “if you hadn’t break she bowl, she woulda never dead.”

Rudy was right. She had killed her own mother. “Uh, uh,” Ti-Jeanne moaned through her paralyzed larynx. She couldn’t feel the tears that she knew were rolling down her face.

“Granddaughter, I giving you a chance to be free of all this right now,” Rudy told her. “That body don’t have to be your home no more. You don’t have to feel pain no more, sweetheart. Your granddaddy could help you. After I speak the right words, the powder you take will give your spirit strength to act on it own, without the body. Let your spirit talk to me, Ti-Jeanne. Let it light the gunpowder.”

He started mumbling the words of a ritual in a language she didn’t recognise. The mumbling went faster and faster, the words running together into a gargling noise. A gurgle. A thumping like a low drum tattoo, as though Rudy’s body were jerking about on the floor.

The effect of the bufo powder on Ti-Jeanne was increasing. She felt herself floating free of her body. She lifted clear of the black sack. She could see Rudy quivering on the floor at her head as his lips moved in the words of the ritual. He was in some kind of trance. Crack and Barry stood nearby, watching the knife blade. She could feel the bonds parting between herself and her body. The ants-under-the-skin feeling had become distant. The pain of her distended belly had eased, and the burning in her body’s fixed-open eyes. Her astral body saw clearly through Guinea Land eyes instead, saw the spirits of the three men sitting like slipcovers over their corporeal bodies. Rudy’s fluttered and shuddered in synch with the quivering of his tranced flesh. She could still feel her body, nothing but an aching weight dragging her back to the pain of her life. If she said yes to Rudy, she could fly. She could burn bright as fire and never hurt. It was what she’d always wanted. Something clenched and released in her astral form, like an unfamiliar muscle flexing. The first mound of gunpowder on the knife burst into flame, sizzled instantly to black, and died out, leaving the rest of the gunpowder untouched. Barry pounded Crack on the shoulder, pointed at the knife. Crack nodded, his narrowed eyes holding satisfaction. Rudy kept up the incantation. Ti-Jeanne made the strange inner motion again, almost just to see if she could do it consciously. Gleefully she watched the second mound of gunpowder flare. Two more to go.

Ti-Jeanne did an experimental roll through the air, a full 360 degrees. Her flesh body always got dizzy easily, but her duppy body had no sense of disorientation from the spinning. She dove down toward the floor and, to her delight, went right through it to the level beneath. Moving through the solid surface tickled, like swimming through bubbles.

She was hovering above the CN Tower’s famed glass-bottomed floor. The sight of the 1,800-foot drop to the city below her would have made her flesh body queasy and afraid, but her duppy body claimed air as its home.

Knife couldn’t cut she, blows couldn’t lick she. She could go wherever she want, nobody to stop she.

Yes, is this I want for true,
Ti-Jeanne thought. She flowed back up to the observation deck level, mentally reaching out as she did so to flame the third mound of gunpowder. One more mound left.

The Jab-Jab was perched on the deck, knees crooked upward, feet flat on the surface. It hugged its angular knees and peered at her through the branches of its limbs. “Having fun, daughter?”

She heard the censure in its voice. Somebody else trying to make her do what they wanted, not what she wished. “You can’t stop me,” she told it sullenly.

“You right, doux-doux. And I can’t stop the shadow-catcher, neither,” it said, jerking a pencil-point chin in the direction of Rudy. “He did make up he mind long time to turn to the dark side. We lose he now. We can’t talk to the ones who won’t talk to us.”