Paz felt his neck jerk up, felt the cords of the chair under him pressing on the backs of his knees. He was stiff. I must have dozed off, he thought. He looked around. The candles his mother had lit were dim in the bottoms of their glass cylinders. That was crazy: he couldn’t have been out that long. His mother was sitting at the table, with Jane, who was still slumped with her head hanging over her shoulder, eyes shut. His mother was singing something, not in Spanish or English, low, a chant. He barely recognized her face. The lines drawn by tyranny, pride, and suffering appeared to have melted away, bird tracks on the beach, leaving a fine, dense surface that glowed like an old piano. He felt a pang of resentment; I could have used some of this, if this was peace, you could have shared it … anyway, what was he doing here with this mumbo-jumbo. He said it to himself, Mumbo-jumbo, and then out loud, Mumbo-jumbo. He stood up. The hell with this shit.
Jane’s head snapped up and she looked at him. “Hold still. He’s coming here.” Her voice sounded deeper than it had before.
“Who, Moore?”
“No. Yes. Look, can you pray? I mean literally. Do you know any prayers?”
“You mean like Hail Mary?”
“Yes, that’s fine. He’s trying to get to you, he’s planting those thoughts, he wants you knocked out. Your mom’s like a rock, he can’t touch her, she’s Yemaya now. But he can get you. Pray, and don’t stop for anything. Oh, and say ‘Star of the Sea,’ add it to the prayer, it’ll link you up to Yemaya.”
“This is ridiculous, Jane, I don’t even believe in that shit anymore, and even if I did …”
There was a sound, a fluttering, clattering sound. They looked at the chick in its cage. It was battering itself against the mesh frantically, smashing its head, over and over, shattering its beak. It fell at last to the floor of its cage, vibrated briefly, and was still. A thread of blood came from its gaping mouth and formed a glistening droplet on the tip of its broken bill. The candles grew dim. The air in the room changed subtly, objects appearing as if seen through filthy glass.
Paz said, “HailMarystaroftheseafullofgracetheLordiswiththeeblessed-artthouamongwomenandblessedisthefruitofthywombJesus …” and continued in a low voice, concentrating on the words, fighting the thoughts that came bubbling up like foul oils in a well.
Then Witt Moore was in the room, no sound on the stairs, no opening of the door, he was just there, looking about the same as he had looked the other night during the supposed arrest, the same clothes, the same half-smile on his face. Standing next to him was Dawn Slotsky, wearing a man’s shirt over her great belly. Her legs were bare, her eyes shut, an expression of beatific calm on her face.
Moore said, “Well, Janey, what are we going to do with you?”
Paz wanted to stand up but found he had forgotten how to send messages to his arms and legs. The chair was far too deep to get out of without help. He would wait for backup. Meanwhile, he would say the prayer and watch.
“What do you want?” she asked. Her voice was cold.
“What do I want? I want you, Jane. You’re my wife.”
“I’m not your wife. You’re a grel.”
“Everyone’s a grel, dear. You don’t believe I’m Witt Moore? Ask me anything. Social Security number, our address in the city, anything. You have a little round brown birthmark about the size of a nailhead on your inner thigh about a half inch below your pussy. See?”
“How’s the Captain?”
Paz saw a little frown start, just a flicker, before he put on the confident smile again. “The Captain’s fine, Jane. Writing’s going great.”
“Yeah, real great; you’re copying Whitman in a little box back in Danolo, with all the women you killed.”
He laughed. “Oh, Jane, you always look on the negative side. And you seemed to like it pretty well, me and my big black cock. You seemed to like it just fine.”
“I got out of it, though, unlike Witt. You screwed up. You never should have allowed my sister’s ghost in there. She forgave me and that broke me out. A miracle in hell. You don’t understand love, is your problem.”
“A fantasy of the weak, like God. There are only the eaters and the eaten. Come with me, Jane. We have things to do.”
Paz watched, horrified, as she rose from the chair and went over to him, and he put his arm around her shoulders. Paz strained to move, but his limbs were uncoordinated and cramped. He fell out of the chair and sprawled on the floor. Moore laughed. “Jane, that’s one sorry nigger you picked. What is that boy doing? Praying? We’re going to have to have a talk about that sometime, Jane. Now, just so you know, here’s what we’re going to do right now. First, we’re going to lay your pal here down on your kitchen table, and I have to say it’s really so convenient that you arranged a pregnant neighbor, and I’m going to complete my okunikua, and you’re going to help, just like you did that time in Danolo. Maybe I’ll save a bite or two for you.”
“I never helped,” she said. Paz thought her voice sounded weak and tired. He found he was able to sit up now.
“Yes, you did, Janey. You just don’t remember. But you will when you have a taste again. Then we’re going to leave this town, which if you remember we never liked, and have some fun together.”
Dawn climbed up on the table. Moore unbuttoned her shirt. Paz got to his feet. He couldn’t think of what to do. He couldn’t think at all, because as soon as his mind stopped being full of the prayer, it was occupied by someone who wasn’t him, someone nasty and full of rage.
Jane said, “I want my little girl. I want Luz.”
“No time for that, Jane.” He took a knife made of shining black stone out of his pocket.
“I get to bring Luz, or I don’t go. I can’t beat you, but I can mess up this ritual. You can’t control me and her and him at the same time.”
He raised the knife, wiggled it. “I could fix that.”
“Yes, you can kill me. But then who will you have to show off for?”
Moore considered this for a moment and laughed. “Oh, all right, the little orphan girl. We’ll take her along, too. A happy family. I can train her.” He turned to Paz. “My nigger? Would you kindly go and fetch my wife’s rug rat?” Paz headed for the ladder. It seemed like the right thing to do. As he ascended, he heard Moore say, “You know, we should take him along, too. We need someone to step and fetchit. We’ll have to customize him, though. He’ll be a lot of fun, until he starts to smell bad. Jane, is that a tear? Oh, you like him? You slut, Jane! Now, we’re definitely taking him.”
Paz found he could stand. He walked to the ladder and climbed up to the loft. The child was not sleeping. She was sitting up in bed doing something to her feet. He checked out the room, still mumbling the prayer. No way out, except through the high window. Besides, why should he try to save the kid, it wasn’t his kid, just a … No! Focus, Paz, pray, pray, take the child. What was she doing? Trying to pull on a pair of bright canary-colored tights over her thin legs. He bent and helped her. She handed him a little leotard in the same color; wordlessly he pulled it onto her. Pray. There were fluffy feathers glued or sewn to the leotard, and golden spangles on the front. “This is my canary costume,” said Luz. “It has wings, too.”
It did. Paz attached them to the Velcro pads on the leotard. They were made of soft armature wire and yellow net and feathers. “I want to show my muffa.” Luz raced away for the ladder, Paz following.
Paz saw what happened from the lowest step, or rather, his eyes recorded something, some events and patterns, that his brain could not adequately interpret. The little girl ran into the room, wings flapping. Jane saw her, cried out, and snatched her up. Jane was chanting something, her voice now strong and loud. She snatched a glass from the table and sprinkled a few drops of rum on the child’s head. Something happened in the room, it grew brighter, or the air became clear, more than clear, like air on a mountain, everything, every shiny surface was sharp, crystalline. The candles flared, their flames impossibly high, like welding torches. He himself felt different, the insistent voices in his head had stopped. He said a final Hail Mary, crossed himself, and thought of nothing, no thoughts, no plans or doubts crossed his mind; he was simply Paz.
But around Jane and Moore things seemed different, blurry, like a bad TV getting ghosts, or messages from more than one channel. Both of them were stock-still, eyes closed in concentration, Jane clutching the child. Moore had grown bigger and blacker. He was naked, a different person?no, more than one person … Many arms, faces. Paz did not want to look at him. He looked at Jane and Luz instead.
Something odd was happening with Luz, she seemed less distinct, her colors muddy. Luz … or was it Luz? Paz knew the child had a name and that he knew it, but he couldn’t quite recall what it was.
“No!” A shriek from Jane. “You can’t do that! You can’t! It isn’t … debentchouaje … it will break the net!”
Now came a violent change, as if all the air and color had been sucked from the room and replaced with an alien gas, an alien spectrum. A presence entered, something heavy, awful, and vast, something far larger than the room, larger than the world. Paz found he could hardly breathe, and also that he didn’t have to. Something had gone wrong with time. He felt turned to stone; he couldn’t move his head, but he saw it out of the corner of his eye.
Until this moment Paz had thought that the carved depictions of African deities he had seen in museums were imaginary abstractions?the gigantic heads, the slitted eyes, the razor-sharp planes of the features; but now he found that they were actually very good likenesses. The room was full of people now, or rather flickering images, like a thousand films being shown at once, no, not that either … He could not take it in, but neither could he close his eyes. He understood, without knowing how he understood, that this was Ifa himself, not riding on a person, but the actual orisha, the lord of fate.
Around him time ripped away from its welding to space and matter. He saw Jane, as she was now, and as a baby, and a little girl, and as a pregnant woman with a swelling middle, and as a crone, and dead, all together, as the gods see us, and Jane, his Jane, was bowing to the being with her hands covering her face. He heard screams. Geometries that the human brain was not designed to record occupied the room. Paz shut his eyes.
Now blackness and … it came to him then, a dream, or a memory. His room, above the restaurant on Flagler, he must have been four or five, waking at night to the sound of drums, going out of the little room he shared with his mother, to the living room, and there was his mami, in a white dress, and other women and men with drums and a strange smell in the air, smoke and rum, and they were playing drums, and he went up to his mami, frightened, and she turned around and there was someone else living in his mami. He screamed and someone picked him up, a thin man, and he said, Forget this, little boy, go to sleep.
His mother was shaking him. He was late for school. He tried to pull the covers over his head, but they weren’t there. She was grabbing at his arm, his hand, putting something into it, something heavy. He opened his eyes.
His mother said, “Outside. They’re coming to help him.”
Questions formed but froze on his tongue. He looked at what was in his hand and saw that it was Jane’s Mauser pistol. He got up and walked slowly around the periphery of the room, fingers trailing the walls, the furniture, eyes on the ground. There was still stuff going on that he didn’t want to know about. He found the doorknob and went out onto the landing.
One of them was already on the stairs, a squat brown man in an undershirt and shorts. He looked ordinary except for all the blood on him. Paz shot him in the chest. The thing kept on coming. He remembered you weren’t supposed to let them touch you. Paz shot him again and the man collapsed and rolled down the stairs. Others appeared at intervals. The last one was Eightball Swett, identifiable only by his clothes and the smell, because his face had mostly fallen off. Paz used the last of the bullets on him. He looked at the big pistol, its action popped back, the breech empty.
What a peculiar dream, he thought, I really want to remember this when I get up. He walked back through the open door into Jane’s apartment.
The weirdness had quite gone, replaced by what looked like a candlelit domestic scene except that Dawn Slotsky was lying naked on the kitchen table. Jane seemed to be talking to Moore in an ordinary voice, while on her hip perched the little girl, still in the yellow bird costume.
“I was the goat,” Jane said. “God knows how long Ulune has been planning this, probably before either of us was born. He set a trap for the leopard in a village far away. And you fell into it. You tried to unmake time before you’d done the fourth sacrifice. Maybe if you’d waited, you might have been able to whip Ifa, I don’t know. But he came, just like in Ife in the old days, not mounted, but as himself. And he took it all back, all the power, like they did in the Ilidoni.”
She set the child down. Paz saw his mother motioning to him. He walked over to her and she threw her arms around him, hugging him like she used to when he was small. He started to ask her what was going on, but she held her fingers over his mouth. They both looked at Jane and her husband.
“You can’t do sorcery anymore, can you? The rat bit the baby, so they burned down the house.” Her voice became softer, and she reached out her hand to him, tentatively. “Is there any of you left in there, Witt? Anything?”
Paz couldn’t see the man’s face, but he saw the glittering black knife flying at the little girl and heard the hoarse cry, words in a tongue he didn’t know, issue from the man’s throat. He pulled away from his mother and leaped toward them, although he knew it was going to be too late. But Jane stepped aside and crouched, with the little girl still on her hip, and somehow the man went stumbling across the room. He caromed off the refrigerator. The glass knife flew from his hand, spun through the air, hit the stove top, and shattered.
Now a high-pitched shrieking, like a siren. Dawn Slotsky was back among the conscious. Paz started to move toward Moore, but Slotsky was off the table and on him, screaming and battering Paz with her fists. She sank her nails into his face. He grabbed at her hands, and over her shoulder was able to see Witt Moore get to his feet and take an eight-inch chef’s knife from the magnetic rack over the sink. Paz looked around wildly for Jane but she was gone. In an instant so was Moore. Paz yelled for his mother.
It took them a few minutes to get Dawn Slotsky down to where she was just weeping hysterically. Mrs. Paz took her into the little bedroom and laid her into the hammock, crooning gently. Paz left them to it and got his Glock out of the cupboard. He knew where they’d gone. He could hear the footsteps above him.
The ladder led into darkness. He stopped with his head just above the loft’s floor and waited for his eyes to adjust. Faint moonlight came in through a high, round window. Green light glowed from some kind of cartoon character nightlight plugged into a wall socket. He could hear bodies moving in the dark and he could hear Jane Doe’s voice.
“You can still get away,” she said. “You could go back to Africa, you could see Ulune. He’d help you. You could try to …”
There was the sound of a more violent movement. Paz could now make out what was happening. Moore was stalking his wife. She was backing away from him; he was trying to corner her. Every so often, he would leap and lunge and strike with his knife, and she would simply not be where he expected her to be, or where Paz expected her to be, for that matter. Things were vague in the darkness, but it looked to Paz a lot like magic.
And all the time she was talking. “You could try,” she said, “to unravel the evil, to make some good come out of it. You could have a life.”
This was too much for Paz. He walked the few steps up to the floor of the loft.
“Drop the knife, Moore,” he shouted. They both froze and looked at him.
Jane cried, “Oh, no, please …”
Moore broke into a clumsy run, directly at Paz, with the knife held out rigidly before him, like a spear. Paz saw the shine of his face, the sweat flying, he saw the gleam of his bared teeth and the eyes, white, empty. Almost without willing it, Paz fired twice. Moore kept moving for a few feet until the hydrostatic shock turned his muscles to jelly and he dropped to his knees. The rigid knife arm sagged, and he fell over slowly onto his right side. Paz kicked the knife away.
Then Jane Doe was kneeling by the side of the fallen man, touching his face; she was making high-pitched, awful, keening noises. Moore’s mouth was open, and he seemed about to speak. Paz saw that there was a look of profound surprise on the face. Jane held his face in her hands, and Moore now seemed to see her for the first time. He said, “What? What?” and then he started choking, and blood that looked black in the moonlight shot from his mouth and covered Jane Doe’s hands.
Jane started to scream then, and pull her short hair and scratch her face. Paz grabbed her so she wouldn’t hurt herself. She fought him and he picked up a few more scratches. He was thinking that, except for his mother, there had never been a woman in his life who would mourn for him like this, and the thought made him feel sad and hopeless.
It took Paz and his mother the better part of an hour to get Jane Doe to stop screaming, and the little girl went into hysterics too. In the end Mrs. Paz made both of them drink something, and within a few minutes they were both asleep. Paz carried Jane to her hammock next to Dawn and the child to her bed. Then he called the cops.
After that, he was involved in police business for the better part of eight hours. It was extremely comforting, as was the story he invented on the fly. Witt Moore, celebrated author, it turned out, was also a devil-worshiping serial killer, who, together with his gang of lowlifes and a large supply of psychotropic aerosols, had terrorized Miami as the Mad Abortionist. He had tried it again, with Dawn Slotsky, but Detective Paz, who just happened to be in the neighborhood interviewing Moore’s wife, was able to thwart the crime, shooting all the gang members in the process, including Moore himself, who had died while trying to kill Jane Doe Moore with a knife (Exhibit A). They had the pieces of an obsidian knife that was probably the murder weapon in the serial killings, too. The best part was that the bad guys were all dead, which meant no legal proceedings were in the offing, which cut down on the uncomfortable questions. Did anyone really believe the strange tale? They certainly wanted to, and the more it was discussed, the more the talking heads discussed it, the more the police PR people gave confident interviews to those talking heads, the more it took on the solidity of the truth.
Paz, however, wanted to know what had really happened, so around midday, he pushed away a mound of paperwork, slipped out of headquarters, and swung by Jane’s, bulling his way through the lines of media people, nodding to the cops on duty as guards. He found his mother still there, making herself at home, talking with Jane and the child around a table laden with food, like a happy family. He fit right in, because he discovered that he was incredibly hungry.
“I told you,” said his mother.
After he ate, he went outside, motioning for Jane to come along with him. They sat at the picnic table in the yard, out of the cameras’ view.
“So what happened?” he demanded.
“You’re asking me? You seem to know the whole story. We went over to Polly’s a little while ago and watched the police chief on TV. You were on, too.”
“I don’t mean that bullshit. I mean what happened? For example, I shot those … guys?” he asked.
“Yes. That was very useful. A very police thing to do.”
“And what went down between you and Moore?”
“The short version? I met him in m’doli as I planned. But I wasn’t ready. The circle of allies was wrong, so I was too weak to defeat him there. Because it wasn’t the chicken. Luz was the third ally, the yellow bird …”
“Yeah, I kind of got that, but she started to … I don’t know, fade.”
“Yeah. He was unmaking time, so that I wouldn’t meet her. So she wouldn’t be here.”
“Uh-huh. He can do that?”
“Technically, yes. But it’s not allowed. Ifa doesn’t like it. The rat bit the baby and Ifa pulled down the house.”
“Come again?”
“An old saying. Ulune set all of it up, a trap, and he fell into it. Anyway, you probably noticed some weird stuff going on.”
“Um, yeah, there were some, um, unusual phenomena, I would grant you that. What was it, some kind of drug?”
He saw several expressions flit over her face. Irritation, then resignation, then the strong features relaxing into what looked like compassion. He noticed that she was beautiful in an unfamiliar way, like the statues of the orishas in the little Cuban shops.
“Yeah. Some kind of drug. That, or the nature of reality you’ve accepted for your entire life is wrong. You choose.”
“Drugs,” said Paz. “And so, what? He’s dead so that means it’s all over?”
“For the moment. I’m going to bury him in Sionnet.” She wiped her eyes. “He was a lovely man.”
“Yeah, well, you could have fooled me.”
“Oh, that wasn’t Witt. That was some chunks of him, the worst chunks, the fear and the hatred, assembled into a kind of robot. Like a zombie but more capable. People do that to themselves all the time, I mean, really, look at the people who run for office. But this was done to him by an Olo witch. He let it be done to him, the poor man.”
“But anyway, we’re out of danger?” Paz had limited sympathy for the deceased.
“You all are. Me, I’m … what’s the word? Or’ashnet in Olo. Deodand, touched by a god, spiritually unstable. Part of me is stuck in m’doli, and I’m sort of vulnerable to beings who live there. I have to escape by water, to fulfill the prophecy.”
The day went on, life cranked up again, as if nothing had happened to time, again there were sixty seconds to be lived in each precious minute. Mrs. Paz went back to her restaurant. Dawn’s husband came home and took her away. Paz and Jane slipped away with Luz to Providence, where they watched the yellow bird in the Noah play. They went to the Grove for ice cream, and to the park. Oddly enough, no one recognized them. Magic, or their fifteen minutes were over? Paz didn’t know and didn’t care. He lay back on Jane’s blanket, with his cheek close to her thigh, and felt as happy as he had ever been.
That evening, Paz gave a long interview to Doris Taylor as he had promised, telling the whole invented story, and casting Jane Doe as a hapless victim, not worth an interview, a very dull bird. Doris bought it and went away happy. Then they ate again from the institutional-quantity load of chicken, rice, and beans that Mrs. Paz had brought, and Paz drank a couple of Coronas while Jane put Luz to bed upstairs. When she came down again, as she walked by the sling chair where he sat, he reached out and pulled her down onto his lap, and kissed her. She kissed him back, then pulled away. “Um, Paz? There’s some stuff.”
“Stuff?”
“Yeah, stop that or I won’t be able to.” She sat up on his lap. “About my sister.”
“If you were an accessory, I don’t want to hear it.”
Her face stiffened. “What do you know?”
“Nothing for sure. But you didn’t blow the whistle on him. I mean afterward. The house is full of guns and you didn’t even try to shoot him. I mean, could he read your mind?”
“Not as such. But he knows me pretty well. Better than I thought. It was like Barlow. There was something in me, from way back, a grel, we might as well say. Insane jealousy. That’s the real dirty secret. I should have told you out on the boat. You have no idea what it was like growing up with her in the house. I mean as a little kid. Nobody ever looked at me. Invisible, like him. Our sick bond, and didn’t he make me pay for it? Except my dad saw me, sometimes, when I was a boy for him.
“Oh, shit, Paz!” She pressed her face into his shoulder. “I saw him,” she said into his shirt. “That afternoon. I knew he wasn’t at the car show with them. He walked right past me and waved and smiled, and I knew what he was going to do. I just sat there. And part of me was glad. Not seeing people is the worst thing you can do.”
“He witched you.”
“No,” she said. “He didn’t have to. God forgive me. And I didn’t have the guts to really kill myself. I just pretended to be Dolores Touey, a woman whose sandals I am unworthy to tie.” She cried for what seemed like a long time, heaving against him, making odd, dry croaking sounds. Then, without a significant transition, she began to kiss him again, and after a mouth-bruising clutch of minutes, she pulled away. Sparks seemed to be flying from her eyes.
“I had to tell you that,” she said, “and also I have to tell you that while I am unbelievably hot for you, we are not going to jump into bed right now.”
“No?”
“No. I was serious about being still a little stuck in the unseen world. It wouldn’t be healthy for either of us. Real sorcerers are usually chaste.”
“Uh-huh. And when do you think you’ll get unstuck?”
“When I’m home in Sionnet, after having escaped by water. The prophecy.”
“But the thing’s over. Dingdong the witch is dead.”
“Oh, right, so now we can just forget what happened? You’ve seen Ifa. Do you think he’s someone you want to fuck around with?” He had nothing to say to that. An involuntary shudder ran up his spine. She rose from his lap, grabbed a straight chair, and straddled it.
“A little distance, I think,” she said. “Look, you’re feeling sexual, right? Attracted to me?”
“Majorly.”
“Right, and I’m attracted to you. You’re exactly my type, as you probably figured out already. You don’t have his brilliance, but you’re more solid. You love your mother and she loves you. You really are un hombre sincero de donde crecen la palma. There isn’t a big fat hole in you for the grelet to crawl into. Besides that, I’m unbelievably horny. The escape from danger, and it’s been years for me …” She laughed. “Always a deadly combo. I’m throwing out gallons of pheromones and so are you. If we’re not careful, we’ll have a romance.”
“This would be bad?”
“Well, yeah. Do you want to spend more time in drugged hallucination? I don’t.”
Paz didn’t like the way the conversation was going. “What do you want, then?” he asked.
“I want to take Luz back to my family and glue her into it. I want to ask forgiveness from them, and forgive them, too. I might be able to help my mom, and even if not, I can be there for her as a person, not a cranky child. She doesn’t love me, but I can love her. I want to sail around the Sound with Josey and teach Luz the water. That seems like enough for starters. Later, I’ll take up my work again. I need to get back in touch with Marcel Vierchau, too, speaking of forgiveness. You know, I saw him once a couple of years ago in the Atlanta airport. I spotted him coming down the corridor and I ducked into the ladies’ so I wouldn’t have to confront him. The point is, I want to live actual life now, not hallucination, so …”
“I get it.” He stood up. “Well, I guess I’ll be going then.”
“Oh, sit down! We just defeated the powers of darkness together and now you’re ditching me because I won’t fuck you?”
Surprising himself, he sat down again. She said, “You want some advice?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure. If your life is perfect you don’t need any advice. That’s a Yoruba saying.”
He thought about that for a while. “All right. What is it?” Grumpily.
“Do the same as me. Stop acting like a baby with your mom. See her. Love her for what she is. And your father, too.”
“What? That bastard?”
“He’s still your father, and you’re not a little kid anymore. You’re a big, strong cop. A heroic cop. You’ve been on TV, on national TV. Your pal Doris is going to write a bestselling completely fallacious but plausible book about this whole thing, and you’re going to be the star of it. There’ll be a movie. The Cuban community’s going to be falling all over themselves to thank the guy who caught the fiend who killed Teresa Vargas. Don’t you think the whole thing about your dad is going to come out?”
Paz had not considered this. He felt fear sweat prickle on his forehead. She went on: “You have to look him in the eye and forgive him. If he rejects you then, it’s on him, you don’t have to drag his shit around for the rest of your life. You’ve got a couple of half siblings, too. And a stepmother. They might have something to say about it.”
“Thanks for the advice,” he said neutrally. She held his eye for a long time, waiting, it seemed, for something that did not occur, and then closed her eyes.
“You’re welcome.” She stood up and yawned. “Look, Paz. I haven’t slept more than a couple of hours in over four days. I’m going to sleep until Luz wakes me up tomorrow. We’ll talk then. Good night.”
With that she walked into her bedroom and shut the door.
Paz drove slowly through the city, to his apartment, showered, and got into bed. For a while he listened to grel thoughts: crazy bitch, white girl, couldn’t possibly understand, never going to do that shit, need to find some other women, need to move out of this place, quit the restaurant, what am I supposed to do, go see Yoiyo, what crap, he’d spit in my face … and then fell into an unprofitably dreamless sleep.
In the morning, there were TV crews outside his house, wanting interviews and film. He brushed past them and drove to the Grove, to the garage on Hibiscus Street, thinking about not going anywhere, about becoming the turtle-faced cop, sixty and all alone, getting blow jobs from teen whores under the crime lights and never a woman to love him like Jane Doe had loved her demon husband. He thought about what Jane had said the night before. For a moment a different path opened up in his mind, a path that led to being a different kind of person. It didn’t last long. He thought he might try to open it again, though.
He found Jane’s apartment empty, stripped of everything but a few trash bags with Goodwill written on a note pinned to one of them. Paz felt a vast relief, mixed with … no, he was not going to go there today. What he’d do now, he thought, was take a week or so of leave, avoid the newsies, maybe fly over to Bimini for a couple of days, meet someone, maybe a girl in a string bikini, a regular person with no cosmic powers who didn’t know him at all and didn’t care …
“Hey, Paz.”
He went out on the landing. She was there, with Luz, saying good-bye to her neighbors, a large, hippie-looking woman with two mulatto kids and the pregnant woman, Dawn, with her toddler in tow. They seemed genuinely sad to see her go, actual tears. She walked halfway up the stairs.
“Well, Paz, how’s reality?” she asked cheerfully. “Thought any about what I said?”
“Reality is holding,” he said, ignoring the rest. “I came to see you off.” He handed her a bottle of champagne.
“Thank you. Must I break it over the hull?”
“Whatever.”
“Then I think I’ll drink it tonight. Will you do me a favor?”
“Anything.” A hint of suspicion in his tone.
“Drive us down to the dock and help me get loaded, and then take the Buick and give it to some deserving poor.”
“No problem,” he said happily.
They drove to Dinner Key then, and Paz got one of the little marina carts and unloaded their small baggage and helped them wheel it down to where the yacht was anchored. He waited on the dock with Luz while Jane stowed their gear and did various mysterious things around the vessel. Jane came back on deck from the cabin. Paz handed the child over to her. Jane had donned an orange life jacket, and now she strapped a miniature version onto Luz.
Under the jacket Jane was wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki Bermudas. She had Top-Sider boat shoes and a pair of fancy sunglasses on, they looked like Vuarnets, Paz thought, extremely cool, and she looked terrific. Bye-bye, Jane. Sad, but also a little relieved.
She said, “I can’t really handle this rig under sail myself so I’ll stop up the Waterway and pick up an itinerant sailing freak for crew, or else I’m going to have to putt along inland up to New York. What I really want to do is run out Government Cut from here and head for blue water and feel a live deck under my toes again.” She stepped up onto the dock and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she dropped onto the boat again, down below this time, and he heard the heavy cranking of a diesel and then the sough-sough of a sweetly tuned engine idling, and smelled the acrid smoke of the exhaust. She untied the stern line and brought it aboard, coiling it neatly with an obviously practiced motion.
“Paz, if you would be so kind,” she said from the wheel, gesturing at the line forward. He untied it, coiled it roughly, tossed it on deck. The boat drifted slowly away from the dock. He saw green water, darkly shadowed. A few inches, a foot, widening. He looked at her, at her wheel, the light shining in her hair. Two feet; she was drifting away. He felt suddenly an enormous urge to leap the gap, to abandon his life, to spend the rest of it with her. She tipped her glasses up onto her head, so he could see her eyes, green as the water. She knew what he was thinking, he thought. The feeling passed, leaving a hollow sadness.
Three feet, then ten. She turned the wheel. The bow swung away from the dock. Last look; he couldn’t quite read the expression on her face, whether it was joy or something else. In any case, she blew him a kiss, and he watched Jane Doe escape by water.