Stormwitch (13 page)

Leroy Frye stumbles up to the car then, clutching his belly as Grandmother Jones comes slowly around to the driver’s side. He doesn’t say anything, just grabs her and shoves her through the open driver’s door, into the front seat. She settles behind the wheel, cringing, one hand up between her and Frye to protect her face.

“Move over,” Frye orders her. “I’m driving. Boys, y’all follow. I’ll go slow.”

Gisele’s eyes widen. She looks out her open door at Poke and Dave Allen, then slams it all of a sudden and punches the lock.

Ray-boy stiffens in the seat next to me.

Leroy Frye lowers his head to look into the car just as Grandmother Jones yanks the door, half hitting him, half knocking him sideways. He steps out of the door’s path, and she slams it, locks it, and crams her keys into
the ignition.

I slam my door and lock it faster than Frye can recover and get to it. He hammers on the window. Ray-boy shouts and waves his gun, but all the doors are shut and locked now. He’s the only one inside with us. The rest are beating on the car for all they’re worth.

The gun gleams as Ray-boy swings it back and forth through the air. Like some club, hitting nothing.

His father points at it.

Ray-boy doesn’t see him.

The engine grinds and cranks.

Outside, Frye bellows and pounds and pounds on the car.

Grandmother Jones stomps the gas like she wants to stick her foot through the floor.

The car lurches.

Tires spin.

“Wait a minute,” Ray-boy yells, only it’s more like a scream. He’s flapping his arms like a bird trying to fly, all the while whipping that gun back and forth. We all flinch as it passes us.

The car sails across the Richelieu grounds just as Ray-boy yells, “Stop!”

I see his hands go still. I see him grip the gun, touch the trigger.

Time seems to stop. My heart seems to catch like his
finger on that curved, deadly metal.

He fires the gun … and … and …

Ba and I are dancing on the beach
.

Time has no meaning
.

Flower petals swirl in the waves
.

Small waves
.

The water is calm
.

Ba looks at me
.

She is frowning
.

Pointing
.

Pointing to the sky
.

“Open your eyes,” someone is whispering. “Ruba! Dang it, open your eyes!”

I can barely hear over the ringing in my ears.

My face touches something cool.

Tile.

I try to move, but I can’t. My hands are tied behind my back.

I manage to turn my head to the right.

I’m in someone’s kitchen. A kitchen far bigger than the tiny space in Grandmother Jones’s house. The floors are white tile with a green pattern in the center, and cold against my cheek. White counters shine under bright lights, and the stove seems new.

“Ruba,” someone whispers. Hoarse and frightened. “Over here. This side.”

I turn my head to the left.

Clay sits back to back with Gisele, bound to her with ripped towels.

Her head is down, chin against her chest, and her shoulders are shaking.

“You passed out because the gunshot was so loud in your ear,” Clay says. “We’re in somebody’s mansion, right across the highway from the beach. Ray-boy made me break in through the boards on the back glass doors. Then he made me tie you and Crazy Sardine up with drapery cords. He and Mrs. Jones and Mama, they’re behind you. Tied to some table legs. Ray-boy, he’s gone to the toilet right now.”

I immediately wish I could go to the toilet, too.

“Keep your head down,” Gisele whimpers. “If he thinks you’re making wind spells, he’ll kill you. He said so.”

“Mrs. Jones, she drove like a wild woman,” Clay murmurs.

“I did not,” Grandmother Jones whispers sharply from behind me. “You okay, Ruba?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, as Clay keeps talking.

“She went busting through all that traffic. On and off the beach, in and out of parking lots, through yards—even one porch, until Ray-boy fired his pistol through the windshield. She liked to have wrecked us into an oak
out behind this house.”

“I did not,” Grandmother Jones says again.

“Yes, you did,” Miss Hattie grumbles. “Thanks to that half-wit white boy.”

“Booger-head.” Gisele draws a rattling breath and raises her chin a little. “He stuck his gun in my ear and I hit him. Lots of times, till he hit back and knocked me down. Then Daddy hit him, and he knocked Daddy out with the gun. Made Clay jimmy the back doors in this house, and then he brought us in here. Guess the owners already evacuated.”

Footsteps thump in the hallway.

I turn my head away from Clay and Gisele and close my eyes halfway. Where it might look like I’m still unconscious.

Ray-boy slouches into the kitchen. He saunters to the giant green refrigerator and helps himself to cheese and beer and everything else he can grab. He carries the food to the nearest counter and plops it all down. Then he starts eating in a big hurry, nervous, almost like he’s trying to make himself so full he can’t be afraid.

As he stuffs food into his mouth, he watches us.

I watch him through my halfway-closed eyes.

“Go on,” he says around a mouthful of hot dog. “Sit up, Juju Girl.”

I open my eyes, but I can’t sit up.

He swaggers over and jerks on my wrists. He pulls and
pulls. I cry out in pain despite my best effort not to, but manage to struggle up to a sitting position.

Ray-boy lets go of my wrists. He jams the gun into my head.

Cocks it.

I swallow hard. Gisele says something to herself, and I hear rustling. Probably Clay, fighting with his ropes. From behind me, Grandmother Jones prays.

Ray-boy moves the gun away and giggles.

I hear the hammer ease back into place.

Ray-boy walks back across the room to a telephone hanging on the wall beside the refrigerator. He puts the receiver to his ear and dials, his fingers making small circles and big ones. I hear the click of the dialing wheel as it rolls back into place between each number.

“Come on, Daddy,” he says. “Answer so I can tell you where we are.”

But apparently, no one picks up the telephone on the other end.

He hangs up.

A small television sits on a table across the room, near glass patio doors. Outside, trees dip and sway. The picture grows clear and goes fuzzy, a victim of the wind, but it speaks a clear message.

Hurricane Camille is moving toward us, covering fourteen miles every hour.

The news camera pans across people boarding windows and doors, or packing their belongings into vehicles. Lines of cars edge away from Pass Christian, Long Beach, Gulfport, Biloxi, Bay St. Louis, Pascagoula—from New Orleans to the Florida panhandle. People are fleeing north, waved on by policemen in rain gear.

Ray-boy studies the screen. “Damn idiots. I’ve been through two or three of these things. Hurricanes ain’t nothing to worry about.”

“Weatherman says it’s a big one,” Clay says in a low voice. “Winds over one hundred sixty miles an hour. We should leave.”

“Yeah,” Gisele says. “I heard him say there’s waves twenty feet high.”

“Shut up, pickaninny,” Ray-boy snaps. He points his gun at Gisele.

She lowers her head.

Ray-boy laughs and turns back to the television.

I tug my knots with bent fingers until the knots come loose. I work them looser still, behind my back, and think of my bag in Grandmother Jones’s car. I must reach it before the storm gets too far inland. If I can free one hand, get one second to myself, I can call the wind down on Ray-boy and get us out of this place.

Or get myself killed.

“You be still.” Ray-boy bends to my face and presses
steel against my cheek. The gun barrel feels faintly warm, and I smell powder and fire.

“Listen to that news,” I say. I keep my eyes straight ahead. My expression flat. “Hurricane Camille is coming. And they say she is worse than any before.”

He grins, and his breath stinks of cheese. “Won’t hit. They always say they’ll hit, and they go to Texas. Daddy says the weatherman’s stupid.”

I think about arguing with him, but I tug against my bonds instead. Gisele jerks on hers, too, and so does Clay.

“Mighty big risk you’re taking.” Crazy Sardine’s voice startles me. He stirs and groans.

“Daddy!” Gisele pulls against Clay.

“Shut up!” Ray-boy turns circles, swinging his gun up and down. Side to side. “Y’all be still and be quiet—that storm, it ain’t coming here!”

He slams over to the phone and dials again.

“Sic the air on him, Ruba,” hisses Gisele where only I can hear. “Quick, while he can’t see.”

“My hands are still tied,” I tell her. “I’ve got to get them loose. If I chant, he’ll hear me and shoot us all.”

Grandmother Jones and Miss Hattie mutter to each other, but I can’t hear them. Still, I think I know what they are saying.

They are asking God to keep Leroy Frye away from his telephone.

Chapter Thirteen

Sunday, 17 August 1969: Night

By nightfall, Ray-boy is too nervous to be still. He lets us talk if we keep quiet about the storm, the gun, or getting away. Crazy Sardine, he’s not saying much. Seems to drift in and out of knowing he’s in a stranger’s house with a hurricane coming.

To keep Gisele calm, I tell her stories about Africa and the Amazons.

“How big was Simpopi Palace?” she asks.

“Simboji. Huge. Bigger than you can imagine, almost four square miles.”

“Mm-mm,” says Miss Hattie. “Wouldn’t want to be cleaning those floors.”

“I hear that.” Grandmother Jones laughs, and I smile.

“If you were a queen of Dahomey’s Fon people,” I tell them, “you would clean no floors. Every day you’d be rubbed in oils, and your hair would be styled, and you’d wear the finest, most beautiful cloth in all of Africa.”

For a moment, I close my eyes, and I can almost see
Grandmother Jones in a dashiki. Then I come to my senses. “Fon kings lived in a splendor never seen in this country, Gisele.”

“You mean you people have kings?” Ray-boy leans against a counter and chews on yet another cold hot dog.

“Great Negro kings,” I tell him, pronouncing the word
neh-gro
the way I would say it in Haiti. “And each with a
kpojito
and many fine Amazons to guard him.”

Ray-boy’s shifty eyes narrow. He seems caught between disbelief and interest. “What’s a po-whatever you said?”

“The Fon believed male and female had to be balanced, so every man in power had a woman to advise him.”

“A woman could tell a man what to do in Africa?” Ray-boy laughs at this. “You gotta be kidding.”

I shake my head. “No. I’m not. The king’s mother-double, his adviser, could overrule him.”

“Stupid country,” he says. “No wonder we made y’all slaves.”

“You made us slaves because you had guns, and you were greedy, and you could,” Miss Hattie says with ice in her tone. “You needed strong backs to work cotton—white man’s gold.”

“Be quiet!” Ray-boy raises his gun and aims, and Miss Hattie falls silent.

“What are you going to do with us?” asks Grandmother Jones. “Are you aiming to kill two old women, three children, and a half-crazy man?”

I see the gun shake in Ray-boy’s hand. He backs up against the far counter. For the smallest second, his eyes soften to a misty kind of scared, and he looks his age. Young-like and vulnerable. Then his expression freezes like cold water in winter, and he looks like a small version of his father again.

“Shut your mouth, you hear?” His voice is high, near to desperate. “Shut it and keep it shut.”

We fall silent. I can sense the fine edge Ray-boy is walking in his mind, and I think the others can, too. Minutes creep by in the silence. The television picture has turned to static, and Ray-boy’s father still does not answer his telephone. The sound of the storm—and the spirit in the storm—rises and falls. I try not to listen to it, but I can tell it’s bothering Gisele, too.

When Crazy Sardine stirs again and wakes, I whisper his name and try to keep him awake and with us.

“Yes, Ruba,” he mumbles. “My head hurts.”

“One thing I have to know before this hurricane comes,” I tell him. “Why do they call you Crazy Sardine?”

He snickers. “My momma did that to me. Named me Sardis, after that big lake upstate. All the kids at school called me Sardine.”

“He got the
Crazy
part early in the Movement,” Grandmother Jones adds. “When he ripped a water hose right out of a white man’s hands during the Birmingham march.”

“You marched in Birmingham?” Clay mutters. “I never knew that.”

“The Man, he liked to turn these pressure hoses on us,” says Crazy Sardine. “Those suckers burn and hurt. Feel like a hundred hands punching you all over. And I kept walking right up to this young deputy, and I took his away. Threw it on the ground, and it flopped till he ran off. But my wife got killed by a rock to the head a few marches later. Gisele, she was just a baby then.”

Gisele sniffles.

“You shouldn’t have been marching,” snarls Ray-boy, back from the phone.

I stare at him, unable to hold back the rage in my eyes.

He blinks.

I see his gun droop, and I realize he was listening to us right along.

“Well,” Miss Hattie mumbles. “Each entitled to their own thoughts, I suppose.”

“We’ll see,” Ray-boy says. “We’ll just see when my daddy gets here.”

I close my eyes and work my knots. Sooner or later, this crazy white boy, he won’t pay attention. Or he’ll go
to the bathroom again.

Sometime in the next hour, nature at last calls on Ray-boy Frye.

No sooner does he leave the room than I feel hands tugging at my bonds. A light scent. Rain on flowers.

Grandmother Jones. “Wait,” she says. “Let me … there. There!”

I pull my arm loose.

Grandmother Jones heads for Gisele and Clay. I glance behind. Miss Hattie is helping Crazy Sardine.

I don’t stop to think of consequences or plans. One purpose, and one purpose only. I must get my family and friends out of danger. Get them to the car.