The place is on Twenty-seventh just off the Trail, one of a line of low concrete-block stucco commercial structures selling goods to the Cubans who didn’t become millionaires in Miami. They sell furniture (compre lo bueno y paguelo luegos), shoes (descuentos especiales para mayoristas), sandwiches and Cuban coffee (comidas criollas), fabrics (grandes promociones, con los mas bajor precios) and pets. The sign that announces this last is hand-painted on a half sheet of exterior plywood, white on black. They are not running any specials in pets, but we go in anyway, early Friday evening after work, stepping carefully around the low concrete cone placed near the doorway. The place is stifling with the heavy ammoniac smell of chickens. Luz sneezes.
“It smells bad in here,” she remarks. “What are we buying here?”
What indeed? We are here because my transmission joint is up the street and I had spotted this place the last time I was by. There are dozens of them in the region we are now in, known to its inhabitants as Souwesera. They do not sell cute puppies or kitties or tropical fish, but only pigeons, chickens, and an occasional goat. All the animals are either pure white or dead black. The orishas are extremely particular about what they eat; they dislike complex color schemes.
I say to her, “I just have some business to do here. It won’t take long.”
“Who’s those?” Luz asks, pointing to the brightly painted plaster statues.
Three of them are lined up on the dusty shelf below the street window. In the center, the largest, nearly four feet tall, shows a dark woman of serene face, in a yellow dress, crowned with gold, holding a crowned child, and worshiped by three kneeling fishermen: Caridad del Cobre, the Virgin of Charity, patroness of Cuba. Flanking her on the left is another dark woman in a blue and white dress, standing on roiling waves, holding a fan shell. On the right is an old man, bearded, in rags, leaning on a crutch. I point to Caridad. “This is the Virgin Mary, and you know who this is?”
“Baby Jesus.”
“Right. This lady is Saint Regla. She watches out for people who go out on the ocean, and also for mommies.”
“Does she watch out for you?”
“I hope so.” I privately doubt that great Yemaya will watch over my fruitless womb. And I don’t go to sea anymore.
“And this is Saint Lazarus,” I say, “he helps you if you’re sick.”
“He looks sad.”
“Well, yes, there are so many sick people, aren’t there?”
Heavy steps, the chickens flutter noisily. A short, stocky woman comes in from the back of the shop. She is dressed in a yellow print cotton dress, her face is the color of an old saddle, and it has the gloss and the fine creases of worn leather, too. Her hair is dark and frizzy, and she could be any age from fifty to seventy-five. She is smoking a Virginia Slim, and looks at me and Luz with a blank look, out of deep-set eyes whose whites are pale yellow. In my clunky Spanish I say, “Senora, please, I would like to arrange for an ebo.”
The woman’s eyes go narrow. She is still trying to put together the white-trash lady in the ugly brown dress and the pretty little black girl into some familiar social category. She asks, “You are omo-orisha?”
She wants to know if I am a child of the spirits, a devotee of Santeria. Something like that, I answer. She wants to know who my babalawo is. I tell her I haven’t got one, and she frowns. Makes sense. This is a neighborhood shop; 90 percent of her business must come from one or two local iles. She doesn’t much care for strangers wandering in and trying to order sacrifices. Why don’t they use their own PETS? She asks, “Who threw Ifa for you, then?” and I answer, “I threw Ifa by myself, for myself.”
A little gaping here, a show of missing teeth, of gold ones glimmering. Female babalawos are extremely rare, white female ones virtually unknown. I watch her trying to make up her mind. Suddenly she is nervous. She senses brujisma, I can tell. She says, “Wait, please,” and stumps back past the chickens and the goats. Luz is inspecting the place like the bold gringa kid she has miraculously become. I have to make a leaping stride to keep her from stepping on the concrete cone placed next to the doorway. It looks like a parking-lot button, and she likes to balance on parking-lot buttons in the Winn-Dixie lot. This is not a parking-lot button, however, but Eleggua-Eshu, guardian of portals, not to be trodden upon.
I turn around then, and of course, there is the small brown man dressed in white who was walking near the ER with Lou Nearing. I have Luz by the hand and the impulse to run is nearly overwhelming, but then I think, no. Ifa has set his hook in me, and is dragging me upward, to the true light or the ax, and clearly, this is a part of it.
The man is looking at me curiously, standing in the doorway to the back room. The old woman is behind him, in the shadows, peeking out from behind his shoulder. He is dressed in a white Cuban shirt and white trousers and he has a faded khaki baseball hat on his head. He steps forward and stands behind the dusty glass-topped counter of the shop, near the old iron far-from-digital cash register, as if he is about to take my order. He looks about fifty, a smooth, round pale brown face, no mustache, unlined, or nearly so. His eyes, shadowed by the bill of his cap, look enormous, like a lemur’s, all pupil.
In soft Spanish, he asks, “Can I help you in any way, senora?”
I get my breathing under control. “I want to arrange ebo. Two black and two white pigeons, and thirty-two cowries.”
He says, “If you come to the ile, I would be happy to help you.”
“I can’t come to the ile.”
He shrugs. “Well, then I can’t help you.” Suddenly his face splits into a grin, showing swathes of pink gum and two golden teeth. In barely accented English, he adds, “It’s like the motor vehicle department. You have to be there. You can’t send anyone else.”
I feel myself smiling, too, remembering Ulune. He was always cracking up at little things. Delight seems to be a by-product of screwing around with the unseen world. Marcel, also. Unless you’re a witch.
I say, in English, now, with gratitude, because my Spanish is not quite up to this, “Then I guess I’ll have to buy the birds and do it myself.”
Shrug again. “You have to do it just right, or the orisha can’t eat. You really don’t want to offer the food and then snatch it away.”
“I understand that,” I say, “but I don’t think I should appear at an ile. “
“As you said. What was the verse Ifa gave you, if I may ask?”
Of course I have it now by heart, so I recite it for him.
He says, “I’m not familiar with that verse. Where did you learn it?”
“In Africa.”
“Africa. I’m envious. I always wanted to study with a Yoruba babalawo.”
Suddenly I realize what’s missing. This guy should stink of dulfana and he doesn’t. That peculiar vibration behind the sinuses, or whatever it is, isn’t there. This means that he’s either a fraud and doesn’t work any real magic at all, or he knows how to mask. It is unlikely that he’s a fraud, which means that he is a very serious player. Becoming invisible in the m’fa is hard enough; becoming invisible in the m’doli is apparently a lot harder. Ulune could do it, of course, or he would hardly have survived, but I did not expect to find the skill in Miami.
I say, “It wasn’t a Yoruba. I studied with the Olo.”
An inquiring look. Which is good. It would be bad if he knew about the Olo. What are you doing? screams the ogga in the control room. Why are you talking to this guy? Why aren’t you heading for Paducah, Moline, Provo? I ignore her; pulled by the hook, tied to the line. I explain, “The Olo claim they taught the Yoruba about the orishas long ago. In Ife the Golden. They claim that the orishas were originally Olo, human people who became gods. They claim that in their ceremonies, the orishas come, but not mounted on people. They come themselves.”
“I see. Tell me, senora, do you believe this?”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore. I’ve seen things in Africa that are very hard to explain except by believing this. Those wiser than I am might explain them in some other way.”
He nods, gently takes my hand. He says, “Senora, you really should come to the ile. The way to escape this brujo is not by hiding or running anymore but by honoring the santos and obeying them. Then you will find your allies, and then you will find freedom and peace.”
A wave of stark terror. My ki is up in my throat. “You know about … um?” I croak out.
“Oh, yes. He is here and he is looking very hard for you. Who is he?”
“My husband. His name is DeWitt Moore.” I have not spoken my husband’s name in some years now, and have worked hard to keep it out of even my thoughts. And now there it is, vomited out into the dusty air of pets.
No recognition, although it is a reasonably famous name in some circles. The santero takes a receipt from a pad on the counter, scratches at it with a Bic, and hands it to me. Pedro Ortiz, it says, with an address nearby in Sowesera.
I put the slip of paper into my bag. Ortiz is beaming at Luz now. He reaches out over the counter and caresses her cheek. She doesn’t pull away as she does with most other people. Maybe I’ll trust this man. He likes children, and my husband did not. He thought the insects did a better job, locking their offspring up in cocoons until they were adults. Stupid, really, to trust, says the ogga, and serves up images of Hitler patting the cheeks of the boy soldiers, of Saddam and the little hostages before the Gulf War.
“You should come to the ile, ” Ortiz says. “We should discuss things. This is a bad thing that’s happening. Bad for you, bad for Santeria.”
“How much do you know?”
“Very little, really. Rumors, feelings, a great disturbance in the currents of ashe, warnings from the orishas. Is it his child?”
“No.”
I converse with Ortiz, about Yoruba, about Africa, avoiding the details of my Olo vacation, making no commitments. I don’t tell him about the okunikua, so that there are still, to my knowledge, only two people in North America who know what it is. He suspects that I am holding something back, I see it swimming in his black eyes. These fixed on me, boring in, he says, “You know, the simple people think that we, I mean we santeros, have power over the santos, but we both know that isn’t true. We have learned to open ourselves, that’s all. The truth is, we are in their hands.” Here he clenches both of his hands into fists. “It’s frightening to be in the hands of the santos, isn’t it? We love to think we’re in control. But we do it because we know they love us and they know we love them. Even Shango, who’s so terrible when he comes. They are of God in the end, a path to God.”
I am nodding like one of those cheap dolls that people install over the backseats of their cars. I can’t stop myself. My face feels stiff. Do I have a phony smile on? He says, “But you know, there are other kinds of spirits in the orun besides orishas. The simple make the mistake of thinking that everything spiritual is good. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“Ajogun,”I say.
His eyes close briefly and his lips move. “Yes, them. The orishas help the ashe flow and fill our hearts with peace. But the ajogun eat it. Greedy things, the ajogun. I hope you have never yourself …”
“No, never. But he has.”
“Of course. But he’s not just a brujo, is he?”
“No. I don’t know what he is. Something no one has seen in a long time, not even in Africa. I should go. I didn’t want to involve anyone in …”
He reaches out and gently grasps my hand. “We are people of the santos, so of course we are involved already. Listen to me, senora. Pay attention to what the orisha says. That’s the only thing now. Pay attention! Come to the ile!”
But I can’t think of anything just now save escaping. It is hot and humid in pets and I can feel sweat trickling down my sides. It’s hard to breathe the thick ammoniac air. In a second I will be fainting, or falling at his feet crying, “Save me!”
Luz skips back and asks if she can have a baby chick. I am about to say no when the santero says a few words I don’t quite catch to the woman. She goes out and returns a minute or so later with a paper bag punched with holes and the top stapled shut. Luz and I peer into the holes. She is delighted.
A yellow bird.
Outside again, in the waning heat of the day, the afternoon’s rainstorm turned back into humidity, Luz announces that she is hungry, and so we go next door to the Cuban coffee place for a couple of flat fruit pastries and a chocolate milk, and I have a cafe con leche. I am in a dilemma. I must make the sacrifice, I must find my allies, but in order to do that, it seems I will have to go to a Santeria ritual, and if I do that, I will light up the m’doli like a fireball and he will know I am alive, for sure. Ulune could tell when someone he knew died, even if it was far away, and perhaps my husband has learned that trick too. Maybe all this running and hiding has been completely useless. Maybe he just hasn’t gotten around to me yet, and was waiting until chance brought him here to Miami. I sense large forces, thunderheads closing in, huge and hard like millstones. I will be ground to powder, unless Ifa is right, and I get the right allies. Magical allies, a concept unknown to mere objectivity. When you venture into the unseen world, the allies weave a circle of protection around you, a kind of sorcerous space shuttle. They don’t have to do anything, or even to know that they’re allies. This chicken probably doesn’t have the faintest idea that Ifa has picked her to guard my white ass. But you have to trust Ifa, and you have to pick them right. Not a trivial task.
“I’m going to call my chicken Peeper,” says Luz. “That’s her name.”
Some Proustian circuit closes in my head once again?the strong flavor of coffee, the heat, the peeping of the chick, a line from Ellison: “A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.” That’s from Invisible Man, and I reflect, not for the first time, that what I have been doing these last few years is a lot like what the anonymous protagonist of Ellison’s book did after his experiences on the front lines of our race wars.
In my mind, I’m in Chicago again, on the back veranda of Lou Nearing’s apartment, the top floor of a gigantic Victorian on the South Side, Fiftieth or Fifty-first, off Michigan, near the university. It was summer, hot in the afternoon, a white sky overhead, and I was looking down into the backyard, an overgrown tangle of ailanthus and honeysuckle and bindweed, with birds cheeping, and I was holding a drink, Kahlua and cream on ice, which was my drink that summer. Lou always threw a big party on July Fourth, which was what this was. I was not, I recall, much of a party person myself at that time?this was a couple of years after my return from Siberia. I preferred to stand back and observe, sucking on drinks until oblivion approached and I could slip into an acceptably louche persona. Then I would go fairly wild, which is how I got together with Lou at another party, at which, if memory serves (and it does not), I removed my underpants during the dancing and threw them up upon a lighting fixture. He was taken in; he thought I was a fun person like him.
Which was why I was standing alone on the veranda, getting my bag on, when Lou came out and said, “Hey Janey, there you are! I want you to meet someone. Jane, DeWitt Moore; Witt, meet Jane Doe.”
The usual widening of the eyes at the name. My eyes must have widened, too, as he extended his hand. There was a definite tingle. The first thing that hit me was his skin, not the butterscotch color of it, but the texture, which was smooth as ivory, like a child’s skin. Lickable skin; it looked like it would actually dissolve sweetly on your tongue. He was a fine-boned, medium-size man, only a hair taller than I was, dressed in a blue-striped button-down shirt, with the sleeves rolled above the elbow, chinos, and the same kind of Sperry deck shoes I had on. He was holding a large plastic cup with a Bears logo on it. Our eyes met; his were hazel, intelligent, sardonic, wary, amused, which was exactly the look I was then practicing myself with my green ones. So we had a little something, even before either of us was aware of it. A little too long on the handshake, that was another danger sign. Lou was talking away, supplying background, his canned version of my adventures, and his connection with Witt.
“Old Witt and I went to school together.”
“At Notre Dame?”
“Yeah,” said Witt, “on the football team. We were both linebackers.”
Lou laughed. “No, in high school, in Morristown.”
“That’s right. Lou used his mighty thews to protect me from the racists.”
I looked inquiringly at Lou, but at that moment, a huge chocolate-colored woman strode out on the deck. She was wearing a scarlet and pink print muumuu and a sparkly pink turban and was carrying the kind of box people used to carry 45 records in. She dragged Lou off into the apartment, promising serious Motown.
I drained my drink. Witt made no move to leave, just looked at me, smiling, making me nervous. I said, “That’s interesting. Was racism much of a problem in Morristown? I mean what was it, white gangs …?”
“Yes, everyone assumes that, but these particular racists were black guys. They thought I was being too white. There’s a certain stratum of black society that responds to uppity niggers in about the same way as your basic Alabama ax-handle cracker does. Or did, since we’ve officially solved our racial problems here in America.”
I ignored the theatrical bitterness. “That must have been extremely painful.”
“Extremely. But enough of me. Lou talks about you all the time. Apparently, you’ve had some wild adventures. Central Asia. Maurice Vierchau …”
“Marcel.”
“Right. What’s he like? Lou says the latest on him in the profession is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. A plausible charlatan.”
“Read his book.” My usual line. “Decide for yourself.”
“I was hoping for the scoop. Secrets of primitive rites.”
“Well, you won’t get them from me,” I said coolly. “Marcel is … an unusual man, but I can’t practice his kind of anthropology myself. I prefer a little more distance from the subject. What’s your subject, Witt?”
“Me? I’m in hibernation,” he said, and that’s when I got the Ellison line. We talked about Ellison awhile, and we agreed that it was one of the half-dozen best books of the century. I pressed him a little about what he did.
“I’m a poet. A promising black poet, as the expression has it.”
I was getting irritated with this. “What sort of black poet are you? Very black? Langston Hughes raisin-in-the-sun black? Or black like Maya Angelou, passionate songster of the unforgivable sins inflicted on your people? Or are you a black poet like Aleksandr Pushkin?”
He held up his hands in front of his face, in a mock cringe. “Wow, what a blast! I guess I have to take my identity politics elsewhere.”
“You do. And I need another drink.”
We talked until the sun sank over the western city, and the trees in the yard turned into silhouettes and disappeared, with the party swirling around us, and the air cooling and then thickening sweetly with the smoke from many barbecues. We talked a bit about anthro, not much, because he didn’t know anything about the field and because my work bored me then, smothered by my lies, and a lot about poetry, which he knew deeply and I a little. He recited some of his for me, shyly, including the one from his first book, that got into all the anthologies later, that starts, There is a plantation in my brain, broad wet acres under the arching skull. The book was Tropic of Night, and it had won some kind of poetry award, and five hundred whole dollars for him to spend any way he wanted.
“It must have been pretty good to win a prize like that,” I said.
He checked me out to see if I was putting in the needle, but I wasn’t. He was needling himself pretty well without my help. So we talked about Tropic of Night. That was the steamy zone where the white folks stuck all their nasty shadows, the zone of projection on the Others. Who were mainly Negroes in America, but other weirdos, like Catholics and Jews, would do, too. The great thing about black people, though, he said, is that they were so conveniently identifiable. Every time we look in a mirror, all that shit is reinforced, he said, and so that’s where we live, at least part of the time, every day: permanent denizens of the Tropic of Night. I asked him if he really believed that, and he laughed, and said he didn’t know. A lot of people did, and he liked to inhabit different kinds of mentalities. He liked to play with roles and masks. But what did he really believe, then, I asked in my crudely earnest way, but he let the question slide away with a shrug. Did I ever get an answer to that one?
He said he had written a sort of opera, which I thought remarkable, and I wanted to hear all about it. That turned out to be Race Music, which made him famous later, a wonder boy at what was it? Twenty-six or twenty-seven. I was actually the first white person to see Race Music, in a basement he had rented from a church out on Garfield. When it opened later at the Victory Gardens there was practically a riot. Makes Spike Lee look like Aunt Jemima, that was in one review. And afterward the same in New York.
But that first night we were being careful. Witt was always careful about relationships, and I was … burned doesn’t quite encompass my emotional state. Cratered? Incinerated? The oggas were in charge, at any rate. So we didn’t actually touch the first night, although our hormones were flowing thick enough to bead up on the skin surfaces. When it got dark, the whole party wandered down to the shore and watched the fireworks. I was with Lou, but Witt was sitting on the other side of me on the grass, radiating on the microwave band hot enough to brown meat. In a moment when we were alone, he asked me where I lived and I pointed to it, a big fancy apartment house by the lake shore.
“You must be rich.”
“Stinking.”
“You want to invest in my play?” he asked.
We drive back to our house and I make dinner and afterward we play. I do sleight-of-hand tricks for Luz. She fools around with her chicken, which I am having a hard time thinking of as a magical ally. Later, I stand on a kitchen chair and heave myself up into the crawl space via the plywood-covered hole set into the kitchen ceiling, and have a look around, eyeballing dimensions. I do some rough figuring.
What am I thinking? Making a bedroom for Luz so she will be able to hold her head high in day care? Something to do while we wait for Armageddon. No, it feels right.
It will be a bitch to build, a cramped, oven-hot workspace, and I will have to enlarge the access hole to drag standard-size plywood and drywall sheets in there, but love will find a way, I suppose.
When Luz is in bed, I walk across to Polly Ribera’s house. The family?Polly herself, Jasper, who is twelve, and Shari, who is fourteen?are watching TV. Polly waves me in and I sit. It is a Steven Seagal movie, and the hero is knocking over the bad guys like duckpins, using aikido moves. I could comment on his technique, but instead I tell her my plan. I want to build a bedroom for Luz in the crawl space of the garage. The roof peak is a good seven feet high and there is enough room for a kid, and also there are louvered windows set into the gable on either side for ventilation. I would do all the work myself: insulation, drywall, paint and plaster, flooring, wiring, if she will take care of the materials and the tool rental. I give her the rough estimate I have cooked up and she agrees it’s a good deal for her. She says jokingly that she won’t raise my rent when it’s done.
So, the next day, Saturday, I drive Luz over to Trapp Avenue, to the Pettigrews’ lovely home, and drop her for a day, fortunately prearranged, of exotic pleasures. Yes, I am taking advantage, but it is so easy to play on the guilt of people like Mrs. P. and I try to keep the contempt and resentment out of my heart. Such people flocked to my husband’s plays in great numbers to delight in seeing themselves abused on the stage.
We did actually get married, which for people of our age and class and intellectual pretensions was unusual. He asked me, too; even more unusual. Now that I look back, I must resist the impulse to put a malign light on everything that occurred between us. I could, for example, say that he asked me to marry him to see whether a cloud passed across my eyes, whether I was worried about what my parents might think. I was worried about what my parents might think, but it was the religion, not the race, something that never would have occurred to him. I had drifted considerably from the church, but my father had looked forward to giving me away in Saint Patrick’s, in the presence of a thousand or so Doe family and friends. Witt was not merely not-Catholic, but an aggressive atheist. He would not be married in a church, nor speak with a priest, nor make any commitments as to children’s education, not that he had any intention of having children. Nobody takes that shit seriously anymore. As he often remarked. The only thing that really mattered to him, I suppose, was his writing. And race, as it turned out.
And the hatred. I thought in the beginning that I could cure him of that if I just loved him enough, that we could somehow build a magic circle within which we could have real life, not life strained through the mangle of racism. I have to think he truly loved me then, and the love was doubly precious because it was obvious that I was the only thing he actually loved. While it is the case that some of the African-American men who go with white women take out upon those women the suffering imposed by the famous Four Hundred Years Of, Witt never did, not in New York, anyway.
We only had one fight before Africa. He had told me from the outset that he was an orphan, that his parents were dead, that he had been raised by an elderly aunt and uncle, also deceased. (Faithful Lou Nearing, who knew the truth, never said a word.) I can’t imagine how he thought he would get away with it after he became notorious. Shortly after Race Music opened in New York and created pandemonium among the great and the good of both races, an enterprising reporter for the Voice located the two people who had raised DeWitt Moore from infancy. The man was a professor of English at a New Jersey community college and the woman worked for a state social welfare agency in Trenton. Both of them were impeccably liberal, both were terribly hurt that their son had not contacted them in over seven years, and both of them were white as Senator Bilbo.
The reporter called me for a comment just before the story broke. I no-commented him, slammed down the phone, stormed into the big room at the end of our loft where he worked. I confronted him, spitting with rage. Is it true? He admitted it. Made a joke. How could you! How could you lie to me. Me! I was so mad I kicked him in the shin. His eyes got wide, his teeth bared in a grimace of rage, he swung a clumsy slap at my face. I caught the blow in ude-hineri and tossed him across the room. Then I walked out. I stayed in the Plaza under a fake name for a week, watching television. The talking heads made the most of it, anatomizing the self-hating black male, comparing him to the self-hating Jew, blaming it on the Four Hundred Years, on the collapse of the black family, on the great and perhaps excessive power of the black family, on liberal mollycoddling, on ineradicable racism, on affirmative action, on lack of affirmative action, and on drugs, because it emerged, too, that Witt had managed to locate his birth mother some years back, a burnt-out junkie whore in Newark, lately deceased.
So I went back. He was pathetically glad to see me when I came into the loft. He looked like he hadn’t washed, shaved, or eaten since the thing broke. He apologized, I apologized, we talked, we turned off the phone and ordered in, and had an extraordinary amount of sexual intercourse for something like ten days.
I haven’t thought of all this in years, but now I am, as I drag heavy pieces of drywall and plywood up the ladder to the loft, which becomes hot enough to make pizza in as the day wears on. By three, I have the floor in and the insulation tacked up between the rafters, and with my rented recip saw I have cut the hole for the exhaust fan. I eat lunch in the mango shade of the yard, and wonder why I am doing this crude and wearisome task. As homage to my dad? Could be. The thing about being rich is that you never ever have to move an object from one place on the earth’s surface to another, unless you are playing a game. My father thought this corrupting, and so he, and later I, spent many hours doing sweaty, abrasive, back-straining work on old cars and on boats. I built my first boat, an eight-foot lapstrake tender, when I was eleven. My mother and sister in contrast never, as the phrase has it, lifted a finger. Nor did my husband, another interesting contrast. This is truly odd because sorcery is a physical thing, and clearly he learned to do that very well, the collecting, the mixing, the stirring, the boiling. The cutting.
While I am eating, Jasper comes by and asks if he can help. He is a strong, stocky kid with a big mass of dark curls and a bright and humorous eye, and I am glad to have him, because I need someone to hold the other end of the drywall panels as I tack them up to the rafters with the nail gun. By the time the sun goes down, I have the ceiling and the walls done, and the exhaust fan fitted into place. Polly Ribera comes by and takes a look and praises clever Dolores, who feels pretty good herself, having let old Jane out of the cage for a little stretch.
I take a cool shower, put on fresh clothes, eat some mangos with cottage cheese and feed Luz’s chicken some bran flakes. I knock together a little box for it out of scrap wood and hardware cloth. Then I sleep, dreamlessly as usual. The Olo regard dreamlessness as a very serious malady, on the same order as aphasia or paralysis. You really still dream, Ulune explained to me, but some curse or malign entity is blocking the vital messages from coming through. I dreamed vividly all the time I was in Africa, and at breakfast each morning, I would share these with Ulune and he would share his with me. Some were not so pleasant, as I am starting to recall. Did you ever have a nightmare in which you “awakened” into yet another nightmare? And couldn’t move? And thought it would never stop? The witch dreams of the Olo are to that sort of thing as the aircraft carrier Chester A. Nimitz is to Ulune’s twelve-foot log pirogue.
The next morning, I awake early, with unfamiliar hunger pangs. Jane is getting rambunctious, obviously. I make myself a batch of French toast and eat it with maple syrup and jam, a pot of coffee, a whole Hayden mango at the picnic table in the backyard, serenaded by the birds. I used to like honey on French toast, back before Africa, but now the idea of honey makes me a little faint. I examine the birds and listen to them carefully. There don’t seem to be any honeyguides among them. Then I go out and pick up Polly’s Herald from the front yard where the paper boy has dropped it. I glance at the headline. I rip it out of its plastic wrapper and read the story. Then I drop it on the ground, stagger into the bushes, and throw up my breakfast.