Indigo (20 page)

Juju mistress? Jerry thought. He had not forgotten the complicated problems of his own life, but to be sitting here watching a juju mistress argue with a bunch of artists had its own draw, and he remembered the fetishes he had bought, those strange things hanging from the walls of his flat like stale works of art. He was eating pepper soup and seeing penis heads dance about, and these two women, first Pamela and now Sondra, seemed to have captured a certain unexercised portion of his brain.

“I would like to see your work before I go,” he told Sondra, but Sondra held a hand up, shushing him so that she could hear what was being said. “They are now discussing the color of your skin,” she said.

It was hard for Jerry to allow that there was any “they” in the discussion. The old woman had been holding court. Sondra, however, began letting him know what was going on.

“This is how it started,” she said. “She claims that when she came up to us during our dance she wasn't making you disappear, but trying to do you a favor by altering the color of your skin. She is upset now because we all thought her intent was malicious when it was not, and she is saying that we don't want to see your color changed because we enjoy looking down on you. LeRoY's telling her that's absurd and Pam is saying that in America it is the dark-skinned people who are looked down upon.”

Just then the old woman laughed and the others stopped talking, turning to look at him carefully. The old woman's jowls moved a little and a sound came out. “She wants to know whether you would like it or whether you would not?” Sondra said.

“Like what?” Jerry asked.

There was a pause but this time it was Pamela who spoke. She leaned toward him and smiled and casually said, “She is offering to turn you into a black man. If you would truly like her to, that is. She says it will make your days easier, that it will improve your life.”

“I think she's right,” said LeRoY.

Jerry looked at the old woman. “Thanks,” he slowly said. He had meant to say “Thanks but I'm fine the way I am,” or “Thanks but I think I'll pass,” but he had paused too long and the old woman thought he was finished.

“Very well then,” she said in good English. “But it cannot be done as I attempted tonight. Tomorrow I will come to the house and we will do it properly.”

She stood then, holding her hand between herself and Jerry as if commanding him not to speak. She told Bramwell to come with her and the two of them stepped into the shadows and were gone.

To himself Jerry said, “Holy shit.” Along with everything else he certainly was not about to get involved with Beany's mom, but all he said to the quiet group was, “I had meant to decline.”

A waitress took two of the chairs away and the rest of them slid close together, but they were subdued now. The bronze man was frowning deeply and LeRoY was too. Pamela's expression hadn't changed much but when Sondra began speaking again, chattering really, it was in a way that Jerry felt was meant to do something like give him courage in the face of what tomorrow might bring.

In a moment, however, Jerry yawned and said that though the company had been good and the conversation interesting, he really did need to get some sleep.

“Ah,” said Pamela, “my God, me too.”

They all stood then, LeRoY signing something for the People's Canteen. On the road again, Pamela took one of Jerry's arms and Sondra the other. The men walked closely ahead, but were not visible, and when they got to the house they all walked through it and out the back door to the sleeping quarters without slowing down.

“Good night,” Jerry said, but the others only nodded. Sondra and Pamela brought him to the door of a room and opened it for him, Pamela standing a little away but Sondra staying very close. He truly had been tired, but he began to wake up a little then. When the door was wide and he stepped into the room, however, Sondra stepped back and both women nodded at him, finally saying good night and closing the door.

The room was as dark as the road had been. Jerry had to feel his way around to discover that there was no light and that the place was small and that there was a mat of some kind, and a blanket, on the floor. He tried waiting for his eyes to adjust, but the particles of light were too few.

Jerry sat on the mat and removed his clothing. His fingers could not find a pillow but he lay down anyway, pulling the blanket around him even while he wondered what it looked like and whether it was clean. There was nothing to see anywhere. He thought of the old woman and held his hand before his face and looked at it, but it was invisible too, as black, right then, as the surrounding night.

Jerry closed his eyes and tried to find something to watch inside his head. His hand was up there, balanced in front of his face, but it fell down and awakened him slightly when he settled into sleep.

When Jerry awoke it was midmorning and Charlotte was on his mind. He was surprised at how little he had thought of Charlotte over the last days. Before all his trouble began she'd been with him always, her photograph on his nightstand, her memory popping up unexpectedly, like something he'd forgotten to do. So why should he forget her now after remembering her for so long? Was it because in the early dark hours of Christmas morning he'd considered forswearing his celibacy with Pamela or because he'd been drawn to Sondra on Christmas night? He had always considered his celibacy a tribute to Charlotte, a badge of some kind, but now that he was in trouble, desire was finding a foothold in him. He had wanted two other women in the course of a single day. Where was his singlemindedness? Where was Charlotte when he most needed her by his side?

As Jerry sat in the small room thinking such thoughts, he noticed a dull light seeping from under the outside door. He could see, now, a low table with a candle on it, and he watched the hairy thickness of his arm as it touched the candle and then explored the table around the candle's base. He could see clothing hung from nails around the walls, a stack of books in the corner, the dark shapes of sketches taped here and there, an artist's idea remembered during the night and recorded by the light of this candle.

Jerry's fingers felt the smooth rectangular coolness of a lighter, a Zippo, he knew it instantly. He gave the lighter to his other hand and flipped it open with the sureness and simplicity of his teenage years, and as he heard that click the lighter lit and the room was all aquiver with the flame's dance, which he applied to the candle, whose wick seemed to reach a little toward it. This was the kind of sureness Jerry missed, the feeling that all the movements of the world could be contained in the opening of a lighter.

Now that the candle was lit he could see that the room was orderly. Though there was a chain-saw sculpture in one corner, Jerry immediately knew that this was LeRoY's room, the drawings on the wall told him that. They showed people in congress, leaning together as if blown by an even and democratic wind. To be sure, these were drawings of abstract people—their necks stretched ropelike off their shoulders, their knees bent backward at the angles of breaks—but they were orderly and attractive as well.

Jerry pinched his eyes, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. It was hard to look at such sketches in candlelight, but the sketches were everywhere, marching around the walls without a stopping or a starting place. It was as if the stories that the sketches told were circular, a never-ending idea that made him pause.

When Jerry finally blew the candle out it was afternoon, and when he opened the door the sun hit him through the spindly branches of a nearby mango tree. There was no more harmattan in the air, but the porch of the sleeping house seemed longer than it had the night before, with more rooms than he thought there could be. Now everything was visible in the outside air. There were old tools lying about, and a few more chickens, giving the place the feeling of a farm.

Though Jerry was surely the last one up, he could find no evidence of anyone else. Perhaps they were working inside the main building, but when he listened he could hear nothing of the industry of making art. Nevertheless, he was hungry; the food of the night before had not begun to fill him up, so he walked across the yard and opened the back door to the main house. He let the screen door bang behind him again, and when he did so two things happened: he remembered his summers in Oregon one more time and Sondra came out of the nearest room, the one across from the chain-saw man's.

“Ah, good,” Sondra said. “You remembered that I wanted to show you some of my designs.”

What Jerry thought he remembered Sondra saying was that she wanted to make him a shirt, but he smiled and said, “I seem to have overslept.”

“What better activity for a Monday morning,” said Sondra. “Start the week off as if it were the week's end, what could be better than that?”

“Where is everyone?” Jerry asked. “I don't see evidence of anyone working around here.”

Instead of answering him, however, Sondra stepped away from her door and invited him inside. He realized when he saw the mess of the room that he had expected this one to be the neatest, but there were pots boiling on burners and many pieces of material hanging from lines. Jerry had to lower his head to follow her around, and when they got to the spot where Sondra wanted to stop, he was strangely out of breath. Though everything about the room was foreign to him it was made familiar and unpleasant by the smell, which was without question that of cooked cabbage, a smell he remembered from his youth.

“It's hard to see what the finished product will look like from this stage of things,” Sondra said, “but you'll be surprised.”

The odor was so oppressive and the hanging material so low down, that Jerry wanted to bolt, to get back at least as far as the hall, but Sondra drew him into the place, into a smaller room at the side. Here a small air conditioner coughed away, making Jerry feel better.

“Lord,” he said, “how do you work in there?”

“Oh, it's quite easy,” Sondra told him, but by then Jerry had begun to take stock of this new room. He turned in the center of it, amazed at what he saw.

“My God,” he said and Sondra laughed. “My God,
nawao
,” she said, imitating his surprise.

Sondra worked entirely in hues of indigo and blue. Each piece of dyed material was stretched on a frame, and the frames absolutely filled the room. The one nearest them seemed to depict the yawning blue mouth of a snapdragon, the colors of its throat deepening, nudging right up against black as they went down. It was a beautiful thing, open and enticing and it made Jerry want to step in. He tried to look at some others, indeed, he did look at them, but the snapdragon kept calling him and when he came back to stand before it for the third time Sondra said, “Very well, then, you have made your choice, and it is a good one. It is too sensual for a man like you but it is yours, my Christmas gift given to you before Pamela could give you hers.”

Jerry was surprised at himself, but he absolutely loved the snapdragon, though of course there was plenty of evidence that it wasn't a snapdragon at all. Sondra was standing between Jerry and her gift to him and he noticed that the material of her dress, the same one she'd worn the night before, seemed an extension of the yawning snapdragon on the wall.

“But I don't have a gift for you,” he said. “I don't have Christmas gifts for anyone this year.”

“Come,” said Sondra. She led him through the first room again, where the soggy stalactites still hung down. Though the night before Jerry had thought Sondra to be about Pamela's age, he believed now that she was younger, and when they stepped back into the hall he thanked her again. His first intention was give her a hug to let her know how much he liked the gift, his second to give her a fatherly little kiss, on the forehead or on the tip of the nose. But when he leaned forward Sondra leaned forward too. She was a tall girl and she didn't hesitate in moving her lips to where her forehead had been so that when Jerry got there her lips met his and his fatherly little kiss was soon deep.

When they parted Sondra's eyes were misty but her expression was self-assured. “That's what I love about American boys,” she said. “They could teach these Nigerians a thing or two about kissing.”

For his part Jerry laid a hand against the wall, hoping Sondra wouldn't notice the bending of his knees.

“Are you hungry?” she asked him. “I know I am. And I think this morning they've got something special in mind.”

From inside Sondra's workshop the rest of the house had seemed inactive, but as they walked down the hall they were met not only by the sounds of working artists, but by the smell of freshly baked bread, which came from LeRoY's room.

“Good,” Sondra said, “I was right.” When they entered the room there was food on the table and good cheer everywhere, as if Christmas had come a day late.

“Ah, hello,” LeRoY said. “Ah, good afternoon!”

Pamela was there, as was the bronze man and Bramwell and the painter. Jerry was pleased with the sense of occasion, though he somehow didn't want to show it. He looked at Pamela in a guilty way and said, “I guess I slept too long.”

Pamela took his arm, leading him away from the doorway where Sondra still stood. “Never mind that,” she said. “Last night we ate village food so today we're trying Western.”

There was a wonderful loaf of thick bread on LeRoY's table, and though it was oddly shaped, its smell was unmistakable. The bronze man had somehow baked it in the same oven that he used for his bronze.

They tore the bread without further comment, but just as Jerry was tearing his piece away, the chain-saw man came through the door carrying a large bundle and followed by the old woman from the night before, Beany's juju mom, whose head still bobbed as she walked behind him.

The chain-saw man put his bundle down by the bread. This was to have been the central moment of the day, the presentation of Pamela's gift, but the old woman took everyone's attention away. She was wearing heavy black clothes and had a critical cast about her eyes that quickly made everyone subdued.