Brown Girl In the Ring (19 page)

“Watch that sinus node,” Wright cautioned Jim. Last thing they needed was to fuck with the heart’s electrical activity.

Jim looked up at her again, eyes crinkling. “Little nervous there, Margaret?” The bastard was laughing.

“Nah,” she lied with false calm. “Just got a hot dinner date. Gotta be out of here by seven.”

“Tell you what: betcha we’ll be done by six. News conference at six-thirty, tell ’em baby’s had a change of heart and is looking fine. Pasta by seven, you and your sweetie heavy breathing by eight.” He bent his head back down over the surgical field.

“You’re on,” Wright replied, moving in closer beside him to begin trimming the aorta of the donor heart.

Finally the heart was hooked up. Wright placed the final lines in the pulmonary artery as they began to warm up Uttley’s new heart. Rich red oxygenated blood was pouring into the heart, feeding the cardiac cells that had been starving for the three and a half hours of the operation. Four hours was the maximum time they could let the heart stay ischemic before it would be damaged. Wright stood back, reached for the defibrillator paddles just in case. “Okay,” she breathed to the transplanted heart. “Do it, baby. Come on.”

There was silence from the team in the operating room. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Uttley’s new heart. Nothing happened. Then it quivered. Wright could feel her own heart thumping in her chest. Uttley’s heart jumped once, then began to beat.

“Yes!” Jim said.

“Contractions regular and strong,” Fang verified. “Congratulations, Doctors.”

“Oh, God,” Wright sighed. “For a second there, I thought it wasn’t going to work. I’m getting too old for all this excitement.” She was sweating with the strain of the operation. The nurse swabbed her brow. “Okay, let’s close her up and get her out of here. I got a press conference to hold.”

• • • •

Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?
Number One stole the cookie from the cookie jar.
“Who, me?”
“Yes, you.”
“Couldn’t be.”
“Then is who?”

—Children’s rhyming game

“Yes, man. Tomorrow do me fine, Mr. Baines.” Rudy signed off. Slipped his palmbook into a pocket. The hospital was happy with their newest acquisition, had flown it to Ottawa immediately. The operation was under way, and he would get his money, with extra compensation for his three men who had been injured in the process of retrieving the heart. Tony had done what he was supposed to. Everything was going smooth like cool breeze, except that Tony hadn’t yet reported back that he’d killed the interfering girlfriend.
The women in that family been giving me trouble from so long,
Rudy thought. And the duppy wasn’t back in its calabash, either. What did that mean?

“Crack!” Rudy shouted. Crack opened the office door and hobbled inside. The dark, mongoose-thin man looked like he’d been to war. He was using a cane to help him walk; he’d cracked his leg when Legbara dropped him. His arm and his side were a mass of bruises from the same fall. There were two fingerprint-shaped contusions under his chin, where Legbara had lifted him into the air. He complained of a persistent headache, for which the hospital had given him pills. And he was the best off of the three. He had insisted on coming right back to work. Gingerly, Crack stood to attention. “Yes, boss?”

“You hear from Tony yet?”

“Tony. No, boss.” Crack spat out the words as though they were bitter in his mouth. He had a personal vendetta against Tony now, for humiliating him like that at the hands of a woman. Rudy didn’t mind. It would make Crack more diligent in exacting retribution, if it turned out that Tony had disobeyed orders.

What was really going on? Tony had obviously had the balls to kill the old woman; what was taking so long to finish off the rest of the job? And if he hadn’t done it, why hadn’t the duppy obeyed its orders and returned?

“Shoulda never let she go back by she mother,” Rudy muttered.

“Boss?”

“Nothing.” He came to a decision. “You could drive?”

“I could drive.”

“Come, then. We go find Tony weself.”

Crack grinned like a dog that had been offered a steak. He hobbled out of the room ahead of Rudy and pressed the button for the elevator. “Boss, if the so-and-so ain’t kill that leggo beast of a woman he have there, let me deal with the two of them, all right?”

“All right.” Where the rass was the duppy?

• • • •

Lord, what a night, what a night,
What a Saturday night!

—Traditional song

“People are going to see that
thing
herding us along,” Tony whispered in Ti-Jeanne’s ear, jerking a thumb in the direction of the fireball duppy that buzzed through the air behind them.

“And that is all that worrying you? What they go do? Try and stop it?”

“I guess not,” Tony replied in a regretful tone of voice.

Pursued by the duppy, they were stumbling toward the southernmost end of the city as fast as they could. The streets were pretty empty, in that lull before the nightlife of the city awoke. Once or twice Ti-Jeanne had caught Tony eyeing dark alleyways as they went by. She knew he was trying to gauge the odds of running off and losing himself somewhere in the city before the duppy could catch up with him. Let him try, then, nuh? She didn’t care what he did. Every time she looked at him, an image of Mami’s body burned across her vision.

Night had fallen again, even colder than the night before. Winter was slowly enveloping the city. Here and there a lone snowflake spiralled to the ground. As they walked, Ti-Jeanne opened her jacket and put Baby to nurse. Her breasts were achingly full. As Baby began to suckle, the familiar draining weariness tugged at Ti-Jeanne, as always when it had been a long time between feedings.

Baby’s little fist opened and closed against her skin. He looked deeply into her eyes as though he were trying to communicate something. He seemed reluctant to take her breast. He’d suck a little, then spit out the nipple and whimper, staring up at her. She was probably taking him to his death. “Child, I sorry,” she whispered at him. He fussed and kicked. “She gone, doux-doux,” she said to him. She’d never used that endearment with him before. But now he was the only one of her family left, unless she counted the disembodied woman who was bound by Rudy’s obeah to kill her. “Mami gone.” She wanted to cry, but no more tears would come, only a sort of dry, gasping noise. Baby suckled halfheartedly and eventually fell asleep.

They were out of the Burn now. They had passed Church Row and crossed Sherbourne, the boundary street that had given the Burn its name; had gone down Jarvis Street past Allan Gardens and were passing the Clarion Hotel, where Mami’s friend Romni Jenny had claimed a living space on the main floor. Lamplight flickered from the first few floors of the hotel. The glassed-in main floor was covered with sacking, old curtains, and sheets to make a privacy screen. Against the jerky backlight, the shadows of the people inside moved eerily against the hangings. Outside in the driveway of the hotel, two old women and a younger man were barbecuing a haunch of meat over a fire pit. They looked at Ti-Jeanne and Tony, then up at the fireball. One of the old women crossed herself. The other two people gaped briefly, then became very interested in the precise placement of the blackened, smoking slab on its sheet of tin. In the city, it was best not to meddle in other people’s business. The smell of cooking meat made Ti-Jeanne’s mouth water. She hadn’t even had a chance to taste the soup that Mami had been cooking for her.

Ti-Jeanne regretted that she couldn’t go in and tell Jenny that Mami was dead, but the duppy wouldn’t let them slow down, certainly wouldn’t let her out of its sight for a moment. She wondered how long it could delay its own hunger and the task it had been commanded to do.

They were now angling through the Ryerson University campus, picking their way past the old stone buildings and the flickering lights of the tents that formed the squatters’ camps on the university grounds.

They were coming up to the Strip; Yonge Street, the dividing line between the east and the west sides of the city. For some minutes now they’d been able to hear the buzz of voices and music and see the glow of light that rose from the Strip, above the city buildings. The Strip came alive at night. To Ti-Jeanne’s surprise, the duppy herded them down Yonge Street, instead of crossing it and continuing down to the lake by a less crowded route. Maybe it wanted to give them the chance to escape it in the crowd? But Ti-Jeanne was determined to go to Rudy’s place and make an end to this madness, one way or the other.

The noise and lights crashed on their senses. If you didn’t look too closely, you could believe that the Strip was the same as it had been before the Riots. Garish storefronts flashed crazed neon outlines of naked women with anatomically unlikely endowments. Deeplight ads glowed at the doors to virtually every establishment: moving 3-D illusions that were hyped-up, glossy lies about the pleasures to be found inside. If you believed them, Shangri-la lay beyond each door, in the form of fragrant, compliant women and men, drinks that shamed the nectar of the gods, and music that would transport you to ecstasy. The Deeplight tableaus shimmered, whispered, fucked, came, beckoned.

The Strip was fuelled by outcity money. It was where people from the ’burbs came to feel decadent. The
thok-thok
sound in the air was the copter limos that bussed people in from the ’burbs to the rooftops of the Strip. From there they would descend staircases that led down inside the buildings. With enough money, you got a taste of the city without ever setting foot on its streets.

Ti-Jeanne and Tony began to push their way through the crowds. Underdressed teenagers jittered in lineups to the clubs, both sexes trusting in the cloaking of makeup and the heat of sexual tension to keep them warm. Every few feet came a request for “spare change for a coffee,” accompanied by a grimy cap or a cardboard coffee cup shoved under their noses. Those people took one look at the duppy and then fell back in silence. But other than that, surprisingly few people seemed to notice. In the fuzzy, glittering radiance of the Strip, the duppy became just one more lightflash to the eyes. She all but disappeared.

Except to one young man lounging lazily with his girlfriend against the outside of a virt arcade. He looked up as they approached, nudged his girlfriend with a smirk, and said, “Hey, check that weird shit. That ball floating up there. Bet I bust their bubble.”

To Ti-Jeanne’s Deeplight-dazzled eyes, he looked like all points, and she all black circles. He was spiked green hair; sharp metal points running down the outside seams of his jeans; the arrowhead hanging from a piercing through his bottom lip. She was black rings drawn around her eyes; the black thighband of fishnet stay-up stockings biting into the meat of her thighs; the black-lipsticked “O” of her mouth when her boyfriend chuckled evilly, leapt up to bat at the duppy, and came howling back down, blood-slicked palm denuded of skin. He crouched on the ground, staring at his dripping hand, too amazed to scream. Not his girlfriend, though. She ran to his side, took one look at the mess, and started shrieking for help. The duppy had brightened briefly as a result of its snack. In the confusion, it moved them onward.

They reached the Dundas intersection of the Strip. The Paramount Eaton Centre loomed black and silent ahead of them, a block-long “elite” megamall complete with coded security fence. If your biocode wasn’t in the mall’s data banks, you got an electric jolt rather than admittance. The crowd flowed past the structure at a respectful distance.

Just as Ti-Jeanne and Tony were about to cross Dundas, the duppy flew in front of them and hovered at chest level, so that they had to back up or be burned.

“What the rass…?” Tony swore.

It was Rudy’s Bentley, coming slowly west along Dundas, horn blaring as it tried to clear a path through the people milling in the streets. As the only car on the street, it stood out, and people were stopping to gawk. Its mirrored windows were a sinister camouflage, hiding its occupants.

“Shit.” Ti-Jeanne grabbed Tony’s arm and pulled him into the shelter of the building on the corner. The duppy followed, hovering fretfully over their heads. “You think him see we?”

“What difference does it make? You’re the one who was going to march right up to his place and deal with him, right?”

“I know, but…” But now that she was actually faced with Rudy, some sense of reality intruded on the false bravado that grief and anger had lent her. What had she been thinking? This was the man who skinned someone alive on a whim! “Not here. We can’t meet he here, like this. I not ready.”

“Not ready?!” Tony’s voice climbed an octave. “Ti-Jeanne, don’t you get it? You’ll never be ready to face a monster like that!”

“We have to run.”

“But if we do, the duppy will get us! It has to kill us if we’re not going along with it, remember?”

He was right. She ignored him. Panicked, she stepped into the street and began edging through the crowd to the other side. “Pardon. Pardon, please. Pardon.” There was an alleyway there. Maybe they could hide. Tony followed and the duppy, too, a little too close for comfort. Now that she was forcing it to chase them, it was going to have to carry out its orders to kill them. She heard a shout. She looked back. Crack Monkey had opened the driver’s side door of the Bentley. He was standing on the running board of the car. He had seen them. Ti-Jeanne started using elbows and knees to shove through the crowd.

“Jesus,” Tony panted behind her. “He get out the car.”

They were on the other sidewalk now, just a few yards from the cover of the alleyway. The duppy made a halfhearted swipe at Ti-Jeanne, leaving a burning trail of blisters on one cheek. She smelled burning hair, batted at a few of her plaits whose ends had caught on fire. “Mummy,” she yelled, “stop it!”

“It’s not your mother,” Tony hissed. “It’s a thing that’s hunting us down. Come on.”

He grabbed her arm and started dragging her toward the alleyway, clearing the space ahead of them with powerful sweeps of his right arm. The duppy swooped at him. He ducked. When he straightened up, Crack was standing barely twenty yards from them, gun trained right on Tony, grinning like the smile on the face of the tiger. Crack fired. Tony was thrown backward into Ti-Jeanne. She staggered back, trying to hold him upright. The blast made her ears ring. Was Tony dead? People were screaming, running away. Baby was howling with fright. Tony moaned, tried to get to his feet. Ti-Jeanne saw the steps leading down to the abandoned subway. “Tony, you have to walk,” she begged.