Indigo (21 page)

“I am late for having trouble finding all my ingredients,” she said.

The old woman had a bundle too, a smaller one than the chain-saw man's, and when she put it down she began pulling at its knots, slowly drawing the strands apart. Jerry stepped up to her when she asked him to, but tentatively, and the bronze man tried to offer her some bread that she waved away.

Jerry wanted to do something to alter the change of emphasis, the swing away from the moment of Pamela's gift, but when he was next to her the old woman reached up and quickly pulled a fistful of hair out of his head. “Ouch!” he shouted. She had two dozen strands of his hair in her hand, and she laid them down in a small and shallow saucer, a juju petri dish.

Though the woman's bundle was untied, a flap of it still covered what was inside, and when she threw that flap back the reaction from the others made Jerry so nervous that he tried to step away. There was a thorn carving in the bundle. The carving was large as thorn carvings go, and it was of a man standing next to a table on which several bundles could be seen. Thorn carvings were everywhere in Nigeria—Jerry had a dozen of them in his flat—but in his carvings dark wood was used for people and blond wood for clothing. In this carving, however, the reverse was true; the skin of the man was blond and his coat and pants were carved darkly. He was a tall figure, gangly even, and he was peering down at the tabletop before him, just as Jerry was now. It was quite spooky. On the tabletop that the carved man looked at there was a smaller version of the same carving once again, with yet another blond-skinned man looking down at yet another tabletop. And as Jerry bent forward, to see how many replicas he could see, he got the idea that the carved men were bending forward too, in the progressively smaller versions before him.

Jerry was as astounded as everyone else. Though its intent made him nervous it was a wonderful carving, a terrific carving, and what he wanted to do was buy it. When he looked at the woman she was not, however, looking at him. Rather she was busy stacking material around the thorn carving's base.

“Now,” she said softly. “Maybe you don' know it, but a man's hair contains all of the color of de whole worl', and dis one…”—she pointed at the carved figure and looked up at Jerry for a moment—“dis one represen' de all-alone white man always lookin' roun' out of his one pitiful face. Everywhere he look is de black world lookin' back at 'im, everyone he see is de black man walkin' by….”

Though it had not been the night before, the woman's language was now easy for Jerry to follow. Also, the act of speaking to him seemed to soften her a bit. She was explicit, like one of the good teachers at his school.

“Look careful at dis man standin' here,” she said. She pointed to the carving and waited until Jerry got close to it with his face. “Do you see here aroun' where de eyes is set? In dat part of de face de whiteness is mos' prominent, do you see how dat is true?”

Jerry peered at the eyes of the figure, whose face, aside from its white-wood skin, really looked like all the other thorn-carving faces he had seen, but quite suddenly the skin around the eyes did look lighter, as if the carver had lightly bleached it there. And as he looked he began to see crow's-feet coming from the corners of those eyes, giving the figure age. He remembered that his own crow's-feet were a part of him that Charlotte had always noticed and had not liked. She had sometimes even rubbed lotion there, with the idea that his wrinkles might diminish under the constant pressure of her hand.

“I see it,” Jerry let the woman know.

“Dat is good,” she said. While she had been speaking she'd been placing other items, all of them unrecognizable to Jerry, in the little pile around the thorn carving's base, and now she pulled the petri dish closer, laying Jerry's two dozen or so hairs on top of the pile. “Now I tol' you about how all de color of de world be lock into de hair of every man, but you don' really believe dat is true.” She had completed whatever she was doing and had shifted her attention fully to Jerry.

“Turn aroun' one time,” she said. “Look into de face of you' fellow man.” She pointed at the others in the room, all of whom were dead serious and standing away. “Look at dem face, firs' de female face, den de male ones, an' don' hurry up. When you look at 'em, look at 'em deep, notice 'em, I mean, like you just finish noticing dis carving here.”

Though Jerry was uncomfortable doing what the woman told him to do, he also found it quite beyond him to actually protest, so he simply let his gaze fall on the two women that he liked. Pamela and Sondra were leaning together, their heads touching at the temples, their eyes wide. The skin on both women was smooth, Sondra's more youthful, perhaps, but Pamela's covering a finer bone structure, a slightly more beautiful face. Sondra's expression, however, was readier than Pamela's, the muscles beneath her skin poised to more quickly respond to the outside world. She was more easily knowable than Pamela was, Jerry could see that now, she was readier to react, whereas Pamela was more judgmental, cautious, and more refined. The more he looked the more he saw. Sondra's cheekbones turned into a rounder smile, her entire face a seduction, while Pamela's carried the weight of her past and was more directly attached to her mind, her forehead expressing alternatives, the possible ways that things could go. And they were not the same color, the two women that he watched. Though both of them carried slightly reddish tints, Sondra's skin was darker, really a brown turning gray, like the last dusk of hazy day.

Minutes passed and Jerry eventually noticed that he was no longer looking at the women, but at the men. He could not remember altering his glance, but when he awoke to himself he understood that two of these men, LeRoY and, ironically, the bronze man, really did seem black to him. Both of them had tribal markings on their faces and, because of these, perhaps, their skin seemed impenetrable, not layered like the women's. The tribal markings, different one face to another, seemed like small ladders leading upward from the center of their faces, and Jerry imagined that the world sometimes climbed those ladders, ideas for art slipping over their cheekbones and into their eyes.

He turned to look at Bramwell but by that time the woman was calling him back, pleased that he had taken such care in following her instructions, but ready to get on with it as well. For his part Jerry was surprised. He could not have imagined, before, that the mere act of looking at people could offer such rewards. He still wasn't looking forward to the rest of the woman's act, but he had found a strange kind of solace in what, thus far, she had told him to do.

“Now here come de hard part,” she said. “In de worl' a man can choose 'is color, jus' like he can choose 'is name. If a man carry de name Bolagi, for example, den people will look at 'im in one certain way. If he carry de name James den de look he get will be Jameslike, you understand It de same wit' everyting. Not only wit color but wit quality o voice an' strength of arm too.”

The woman paused, perhaps she had finished, perhaps not, but Jerry discovered that he was involved again, following what she had been saying so closely that he thought he saw some truth in it, though when he tried to focus on that truth it went away.

The woman shook him slightly, pointing back down at the thorn carving and the pile of odd materials at its base.

“Do you have a match?” she asked, and without pausing Jerry pulled the Zippo lighter out of his pocket. Though he'd been unaware of it, he had taken the lighter from LeRoY's room and had been clutching it the whole time. He flipped it open and watched the flame dance up, smiling when he saw the old woman's surprise. Though he wanted to believe that everything he'd seen was a harmless exercise, he had found it terribly interesting, and he was pleased that when he held the lighter out to her she handled it gingerly, two fingers on its bottom, ready to flick it away if it felt too hot.

She held the lighter in one hand and put her other hand on Jerry's elbow, pushing him around until he stood just like the thorn-carving man did, both of them looking down. Then she touched the Zippo to the edge of the table, about a foot from the carving but against a trail of what Jerry could only imagine was some kind of fuse. There was a sharp snapping sound while the flame shot across the table, and there was the mildest of explosions when it hit the main body of the bonfire she had built, leaping from the carving's base and engulfing the figure of the man and sending the putrid smell of burning hair into the room at the same time. Surely he imagined it, but Jerry thought he felt the sting of the flames too, and when he looked to the place where the sting was strongest he noticed the presence of a rash on his arm, unknown to him before, but thriving, from his elbow onto the back of his hand. He lost a little of his disbelief then and tried to step back to the edge of the room with the others.

The awful smell of the burning hair was accompanied by so much smoke that for a moment the figure on the table was difficult to see. But in a minute the old woman took the last item from her bundle, an African cap, and before things got worse she placed the cap over the entire fire, making everything die quickly down and, rather miraculously, making that putrid smell go away too. When she removed the cap she held her hand out to the thorn carving and everyone could see that, indeed, the carved man was now black.

“The body of a living man is larger than dis one, so wit you it will take longer,” she said. After that she pulled Jerry toward her and put the smoky cap on his head and told him not to take it off.

The old woman packed up and left then, and when she was gone LeRoY went to the wall and turned on his air conditioner, sending a rattling sound into the room long before the cool air came. The others seemed relieved that she was gone, but they were still subdued, so Jerry used the time to go over next to LeRoY and put his arm against the air conditioner so that when the cool air did finally come it would flow across that newly discovered rash of his before jetting out into the room.

After Bramwell's grandmother left, the bread was passed around again, and then the bronze man brought in a course of eggs and rice, and by the time they had all finished eating, the pleasantness of their earlier mood had sufficiently returned for Pamela to bring Jerry back to the bundle that sat on the far edge of LeRoY's table, her Christmas gift to him, the original reason for their visit here.

“My arm really hurts,” Jerry said. “Do you suppose I'm allergic to something that she put on that fire? It feels almost like a bee sting.” As he spoke he tried to remove his cap, but everyone told him to leave it on.

Sondra took his arm, holding it up to the light. “Maybe it is a coincidence,” she said, “maybe it's a bite.” She pointed to a welt about midway between Jerry's wrist and elbow. The redness seemed to emanate from the welt and a certain swelling was evident directly under it.

For a small moment everyone looked for signs of red ants, but Jerry could feel the falseness of their search. The bid woman had done something to him and he'd been stupid enough to let it happen. Now, on top of everything else, he'd probably have to find a doctor. Jerry was irritated, and a little worried, but pretty soon they were all grouped around the gift again, so he let his irritation go. The chain-saw man had worked through the night on Jerry's gift, but whoever had wrapped it had done a poor job. Most of the wrapping was newsprint, some of it an advertisement for Nigerian toilet tissue. Jerry could see the flat depiction of a blond baby girl staring up at him from the bottom of the gift.

Pamela put her hand on Jerry's sore arm, making him flinch. “Open it,” she said. “I think that you will like what you find.”

At first Jerry tried to untape the gift carefully but the taping job was too random for such intricate work. So in the end he tore the wrapping away, pausing only briefly to see whether or not there were articles about him in the newspapers that had been used.

Though Jerry had not understood it when he'd seen the chain-saw man start work on his gift the day before, the log he'd used was ebony and the darkness of the wood gleamed at him as the paper came loose in his hands. He had expected something rough, something that carried a chain saw's legacy, something, perhaps, like the redwood tabletops he remembered seeing in northern California when he and Charlotte took their yearly vacations, but what he got was nothing like that. What he got was nearly a filigree. The log had been hollowed out without breaking the continuity of its outside inch or two, and then that outside inch or two had been worked so finely, cut so beautifully, that Jerry thought it must have been done with the best and most intricate hand tools. He looked at the chain-saw man and then at Pamela and then back at the cuts in the wood. The ebony log had been worked into a tree of life, with men and animals carved so cleverly into it that they seemed to dance around like the figures on a carousel. There were men climbing toward the top and monkeys swinging from one cut to another with such realism that Jerry felt sure that the ebony would break the moment the monkeys released their hands. When he looked really closely at the figures he could see that the contours of their bodies were not smooth, but beveled, and he imagined a chain saw the size of scissors, the sounds of its motor muffled in the artist's big hands.

“This is wonderful,” he said. He wanted to say something better, but he could not take his eyes off the tree of life, which seemed to him to depict what he was doing now, climbing toward the top, trying to get into the sunlight again.

“This is a terrific gift,” Jerry finally said, and though it was Sondra who gave him the smile he wanted, Pamela nodded gravely, as if to say she knew it was.

By this time, though everyone had treated it as a special day, the day that Christmas should have been, the others seemed ready to get back to work. So Bramwell helped Pamela carry the tree of life while Jerry picked up the charred thorn carving on his way out of the room. Though the carving had been burned, it had looked solid enough, but as he stepped into the hallway it fell apart in his hands, its ash turning his arms really black, and small pieces of it falling to the floor. While Jerry bent to clean up the mess, LeRoY swept his tabletop, pushing the residue of the juju fire out the door after them.