Brown Girl In the Ring (21 page)

She jerked herself to her feet and went and sat at one of the food court tables, giving the boy some privacy. She realised that she was stabbing the bloody tweezers over and over again into the cracked Formica of the table.

“You tried,” came Josée’s voice. She put a bundle down on the table. Clean clothes. Or unbloodied, at least.

“Allyou was only trying to help me,” Ti-Jeanne wailed.

“Yeah, we thought it’d be a lark. Besides, you and your granny helped us, eh?”

Ti-Jeanne realised that the girl’s eyes were brimming. The tough words were just a cover-up. “Josée, I sorry.”

“I know. Just change your clothes, all right?”

Ti-Jeanne obeyed. The pants were too big. The collar of the shirt was streaked with dirt, and it hung from her shoulders almost to midthigh. It would have fitted Chu. Hot tears fell on her hands as she tied one of the bandage strips like a belt around her waist. Sniffing, she told someone to swab and bandage little Alyson’s cut while she checked on Tony.

“You luckier than that boy,” she said bitterly to her grandmother’s murderer. “In the shoulder and out the back. Some bones crack, but that go heal.”

“Thank you, Ti-Jeanne.”

“Don’t thank me!” She wrapped up his injury, more roughly than she needed to. He didn’t complain. She laid him back down, yanked the blanket up over him. Chu’s body had been wrapped in his coat. Josée was organizing a bunch of kids to take him out and bury him.

The cold slicing through my shirt like knives. I find myself standing outside, no jacket or boots or nothing, just my blouse and jeans and my runners. I know this building—them used to call it the CN Tower. Now we does just call it Rudy office. Mami tell me is the tallest freestanding building in the world. Is must be true. Anywhere you is in the city, you could look south towards the lake and see the needle shape of the tower stretching up to the clouds, with the bulge of the observation deck in the middle. One night, I see lightning strike the tip. The whole sky go white. For a hour after, every time I close my eyes, I see jig-jag lightning flashing behind my lids.

I look up, up. I almost have to crane my neck backwards to see all the tower, like I trying to look up into God Father face heself. I ain’t go see He face today, though. The cloud cover so low it hiding even the observation deck. I swear, that tower reach right to the stars. It make me giddy, like I can’t tell top from bottom no more, and gravity ain’t have no meaning. I frighten too bad. Either I going to fall off the earth into that forever sky, or the whole tower going to come crashing down upon me.

“It long, eh?” somebody say from right behind me. I jump and whip around. The whole world do a spin with me and right itself again. The Jab-Jab standing there. Too close. I back up. It just bust a grin and say, “You coming?” It run up to one of the deep, curving walls of the tower and it start to climb up the side, digging it fingers in like the cement is cheese. It climb ten feet, twenty, thirty. Then it stop and look back down on me. “You ain’t coming? Ain’t is Rudy you want to go and see?”

“I have to, yes. I can’t make this go on no longer. But I can’t climb like that,” I say. All this time it been haunting me, and now is the first time I find voice enough to speak to it.

It frown and jump back down beside me, with a sound like two-by-fours falling in a pile. It shake a wood pencil finger at me. “And I suppose you won’t even try.” It sigh a big, jokey sigh, raising and dropping it shoulders-them like all the weight of the world there upon them. “You have to stop he, you know,” it tell me. “Is only you leave. Gros-Jeanne dead and Mi-Jeanne get trapped. Is up to little Ti-Jeanne. So how you going to get in there? Think! Think fast and tell me, nuh? Think!”

“No, Jab-Jab,” I say. “If I let myself think about what I going to meet up in there, I won’t do it. I have to find another way.”

“So you won’t use force of body, and you won’t use force of will, neither,” it say, smiling.

I ain’t know why it smiling. Body and will. Brawn and brains. It ain’t have nothing leave to use after brawn and brains, oui. But then I get a idea. “I think I go have to trick Rudy into letting me in.”

“Yes!” The Jab-Jab start to jump and prance like a marionette on strings, dancing in glee. “Is so the story go. Force won’t work against a greater force. Rudy is Bull Bucker, so you have to be Duppy Conqueror. You must use cunning. Cunning and instinct, that’s the trick, my doux-doux darling.”

“Bull Bucker? Duppy Conqueror? I ain’t understand.”

“Rudy tough, so you have to be tougher.”

Tougher than Rudy? Jeezam Peace. “I wish if I could be invisible, like when I try to smuggle Tony outcity.”

The Jab-Jab stop smiling. It stop dancing. It give me a disgusted look. “Well, like you know everything already, then. You ain’t need me.” And it disappear.

“Wait! Come back! I need you, yes!”

But it ain’t come back. The wind spring up hard around the foot of the CN Tower and start buffeting me about. The wind only calling my name: “Ti-Jeanne, Ti-Jeanne.”

Josée had her by both shoulders and was shaking her. “Ti-Jeanne, snap out of it. Ti-Jeanne.”

Ti-Jeanne put up her hands to stop the girl from shaking her. “You could stop now. I come back.”

“Come back from where?” Josée crouched in front of her, looking at her with concern. “You didn’t go anywhere. You was just sitting there, and your eyes glazed over, and you wasn’t answering when we talked to you.”

Ti-Jeanne wasn’t paying attention. The Jab-Jab had disappeared when she wished she could become invisible again. Said it didn’t need to tell her any more. Maybe she could do it, then.

“Ti-Jeanne?” Josée was reaching out a hand to shake her shoulder again.

Ti-Jeanne held her off. “No, no, I all right. I only thinking.”

She realised that the vision had spoken true, even if its message was confusing. She’d go and face Rudy. She would take Tony’s gun. Maybe she’d have time to use it on Rudy before his raggas reached her.

She’d have to sneak in. She thought about what the Jab-Jab had said. The last time she had been invisible, it was with Legbara’s blessing. Mami had performed the ritual and begged the help of the spirits, and Legbara had answered, had hidden Ti-Jeanne from human eyes, midway between the real world and Guinea Land. And she had been able to extend the invisibility to Tony because she was carrying a gift of his concealed on her body.

Something about that thought was pricking at her consciousness. Extend the invisibility, extend…slowly the idea unfurled in her, tentative as one of Mami’s wild roses opening to the sun. As her thought bloomed full, Ti-Jeanne felt a small, fierce smile creeping around her lips, like the fighters’ grins she’d seen on Josée’s and Mumtaz’s faces. The Jab-Jab was right. Cunning, not force. She didn’t have a plan yet, but maybe she had a way of getting unhurt into her grandfather’s office. She would give Rudy the Bull Bucker more than he’d bargained for.

“Josée,” she said, “I going to call on Mister Rudy. I need some candy. And a cigar.”

The young woman looked puzzled, but didn’t ask any questions. “It’s your funeral,” her shrug seemed to say. As it well might be. Josée polled the other children, and in a matter of seconds they produced two striped peppermint candies dotted with pocket lint. “Cigarette okay?” Josée asked, flipping one from behind her ear. “We ain’t got cigars.”

“Yes, I think that go be good enough.” It would have to be. “You have matches?”

Legbara was an Eshu, but she had nothing to use to represent his head, no white rum to spray him with. Just the offerings of dusty candy and stale cigarette smoke. Maybe Legbara would understand that that was all she had. She gave Baby to the little girl who had asked to hold him back at the farm. No qualms this time about whether she was clean enough. Ti-Jeanne had the guilt of Chu’s blood on her conscience. So who was the dirty one?

Ti-Jeanne asked the children to give her privacy for a while and went into a secluded corner of the food court. The children watched curiously but didn’t approach her.

Ti-Jeanne crouched, facing the wall. How to start? Suppose she got it all wrong?

Use your instinct, the Jab-Jab had said. She looked over at the coat that wrapped Chu’s body. Blood had seeped through it. She went over there and rolled a forefinger in it, silently thanking the young man for the gift of his life’s blood.

Back in her corner she traced the Eshu image in Chu’s blood on the bare ground: oval face, bulging eyes, and pursed lips. She waited. Nothing happened. No angry spirit appeared to strike her dead for her presumptuousness.

Mami had given the candy as offerings to the Eshu. Ti-Jeanne put the peppermints in front of the image she’d drawn. Then she lit the cigarette and, coughing, blew smoke gently over Eshu’s face. She didn’t dare beat out a rhythm with her fingers, for fear it would be the wrong one. All she could do was call on Legbara, her own personal Eshu:

“Papa Legbara,” she whispered, feeling foolish, “I going to try and end the work that Mami and Mi-Jeanne couldn’t finish. I going to try and stop Rudy.” She knew that by calling the spirit “Papa,” she was acknowledging a bond between them. Strangely, that felt safe and right, not the imposition on her that she had thought it would be. That gave her the courage to say a little more: “Help me, please, Papa, and I go make a proper meal for you. Send me to the shores of Guinea Land again, so I could get into Rudy office without anyone seeing me.”

All right, she’d done it. She sat back on her heels to wait, then remembered the trick she wanted to play, if Legbara would accept the truth as she explained it and go along with her. “Oh! Papa, another thing: I want to extend the invisibility to someone else. I carrying he gift in secret. Papa, I carrying Rudy blood in my veins.”

Ti-Jeanne smirked in satisfaction. That should give Rudy a shock, when all of a sudden no one could see him. This battle would be just between him and her. If it worked.

She waited long minutes to see if Legbara would accept her gift. Behind her, she could hear the children shuffling, mumbling. A young voice said, “But what’s she
doing
?” Someone hushed the child.

It crept up silently, the fog that only she could see, around the edges of the food court at first, then slowly narrowing in. Papa had heard her! She had to move quickly. She stood, stamping the feeling back into her feet, and hurried over to the group of children. “Josée, listen. I don’t have plenty time. If I lucky, I go stop Rudy for good.” The fog was curling about the floor now, poking thin fingers up into the room.

“And if you’re not?” Josée asked.

“Never mind that. You know Romni Jenny what live in the Clarion Hotel?”

“The Gypsy lady? Yeah. She’s the one told me to bring Susie to your grandma.”

“Good. Take Baby to she. Right away! Tell she to look after he if I don’t come back. Promise me you go do it, Josée!”

“Yeah, sure, I promise. But…!?” The fog reached Ti-Jeanne’s knees, climbed to her waist. Josée started to protest, to ask questions, but her eyes popped as she saw Ti-Jeanne slowly disappear before her eyes, toe to top.

“Magic,” breathed Mumtaz. She put her hand to her mouth. The children backed away.

Ti-Jeanne took the first few stairs up to street level at a run. The gun! She’d forgotten it. She went back and got it out of Tony’s jacket pocket. She held it awkwardly. It was heavy. Was it loaded? She didn’t know how to check. Was that thing there the safety? “This is sending fool to catch the wise, oui,” she murmured.

Josée was sitting on the floor, awkwardly putting Baby’s coat and mittens back on.

“Where’re you taking him?” asked Mumtaz.

“Um…” Josée frowned as though she were trying to remember something. Then her face brightened. “Um, well, he can’t stay here. I just got this idea to leave him with that Gypsy woman, you know, Jenny? Maybe she can look after him for a while.”

They seemed to have forgotten that Ti-Jeanne had ever been there.

B
loodcloth!” Rudy cursed when he felt the sting from the cold compress Crack was pressing against the burns on his face.

“Sorry, boss.”

Rudy didn’t bother to answer that. The duppy had transported them quickly back to the old nightclub at the top of the CN Tower, but even in those few seconds, her heat had begun to blister the exposed parts of their bodies. Crack’s left palm was one angry, weeping sore where his gun had overheated in his hand. Luckily the bullets hadn’t discharged.

Anger bubbled up in Rudy like a pot boiling over. To make everything worse, the duppy was probably hungry again, after the burst of energy it had used to carry them. He was going to have to feed it soon, which meant sending someone out at this time of night to hunt down some street kid or vagrant. He glared at the round-bottomed calabash sitting on its ring of cloth. The duppy had caused him a lot of trouble. He could punish it by withholding the lifeblood it needed, but he had to be careful with that. The power he had over it would only hold as long as he fed the spirit regularly and kept a container for it. He had once heard of a shadow-catcher who broke the rules of her pact with her duppy. It had turned on her. The people who found her said it looked as though she’d taken hours to die and that they’d never forget the stare of horror frozen on her dead, ruined face.