Brown Girl In the Ring (15 page)

“Oh, I know you can’t see no scar or nothing on me face now. Me does keep meself young and good-looking nowadays. No scar, no scratch, that me duppy don’t fix it for me. And it take away the craving for buff, too.

“So yes, posse do for me that night. And them wasn’t the first one to do me bad, no, sir. From I born, people been taking advantage. Poor all me born days. Come up to Canada, no work. Me wife and all kick me out of me own house. Blasted cow. If it wasn’t for me, she woulda still be cleaning rich people toilets back home, and is so she treat me. Just because me give she little slap two-three time when she make she mouth run away ’pon me.” Anger at the injustice of it all burned again in Rudy. But it wasn’t like that now. Nobody took advantage of him now.

“So lying there in me broken bones that night, me decide nobody nah go get nothing from me no more. Time to get my due back from them, you understand?”

A line of spittle ran from Tony’s mouth to drip down his chin onto his shoulder, mixing with the tears that were now running freely from his tortured eyes.

“Me face did swell up, the two ends of break bone in me leg rubbing every time me try to move. And me call the Eshu. The One in the Black Cape, just like me wife did show me. Me soul did already flying free from all the buff what me slash, and me reach out from them heights there, and me call, drumming the rhythm on the ground with me one good hand that leave. Me ain’t know how long me call, but me swear me see the sun come up and go back down again. And me ain’t stop. Mouth dry, leg a-pain me, and me ain’t stop for nothing. Finally him come, and me tell him me want him to kill everybody that do me bad. And imagine this: blasted Eshu tell me no! Him tell me say revenge is one thing, but him nah go help me to kill, for nobody I vex with ain’t kill nobody of mine.
But killing is that me want,
me say to him.
And if you don’t give it to me, I go keep drumming you back here until you do it.
And me do it, seen? So him go ’way, so me drum him back. Three times. The buff wasn’t keeping away the pain no more. Plenty times me nearly faint from it, but me bite me lip to keep me awake, and me keep on drumming. The third time him come back, him did vex, you see? Him say all right, if is death I want to deal in, he go tell me what it take for a man to deal in the dead. Stupid spirit. Him think say I woulda frighten at what I have to do, and I would back off with me tail between me legs. But I listen, and I learn. Him tell me must find a dead in the cemetery, somebody who just cross over. Him tell me must call the dead man duppy, and make him serve me. Him tell me how to keep the duppy by me, and what to feed it. He tell me if I do alla that, neither him nor the rest of the ancestors go want nothing more to do with me. Well, me didn’t business with that; what the ancestors ever do for me before?” Rudy chuckled, half to himself. “Is long time I had to wait till me leg heal good enough to follow he instructions. But you know what? I is a patient man.” He fell silent for a minute, remembering the smell of carrion and grave dirt on the night he’d gone to the cemetery. “Sometimes I wonder is what Eshu think when he watch me doing everything he say, and he see the duppy rise. It heal me, Mas’ Tony; heal me good good like you see me now. Then each day after that, one of my enemies dead. On the third day, was Dunston turn. Blasted man who steal my woman. When them find him, him had no skin left on him body, and his heart did rip out. Dogs, them say. Me know better. Then me tell the duppy me want more than that. Me want to run things in the posse. And so I ask, is so it go. Inside of a year, I was posse boss. Funny thing that, eh?”

Tony made no sound.

“What you think Eshu want now, eh, Tony? Why you think he warn me away from your woman? Ti-Jeanne, Mi-Jeanne, Gros-Jeanne; them fucking women been giving me trouble from since when!”

Rudy turned Tony’s chair to face him. He reached out a big, powerful hand and closed the man’s eyes with a deliberate tenderness. “See now? Don’t that feel better?” Tony made a mewing sound. Rudy looked down at Tony’s body and chuckled. Funny how many of them this happened to. “But see how you pay me back for my kindness,” he told Tony. “You gone and piss up my good good chair. Is a good thing the seat make out of leather. Melba, get a damp cloth and clean up this chair.”

Easily as he would a doll, Rudy lifted Tony out of the chair and lowered him to the floor. He removed Tony’s shoes and socks, undid his belt buckle, and began taking off the sodden pants. Tony’s moaning started up again, like a weak sobbing.

“But what a way this man could fret, ee?” Rudy inquired gently. “Don’t you want to have fresh, clean clothes? I go get Melba to bring some for you.”

Once the pants were off, Rudy sat back on his heels and looked at the helpless, half-naked man. Maybe he should have robbed Tony of his volition when he’d had the time to, the way he had done with Melba. Then the man would have done anything he told him to. But the mindless slaves could only follow simple instructions. He needed Tony to be aware so that he could use his medical training to transfer the live heart into its container.

The paralysis must have begun to wear off a little. Tony had managed to open his eyes and was blinking slowly through his tears. His eyes seemed to beg. It was Rudy’s power alone to answer that plea. Or not. Rudy felt the familiar tightening in his crotch that that sense of power always brought him.

“Well, boy, look at you. The time come to pay the piper. You been bringing me one set of trouble. You had a match for the heart all along, but you been wasting time? Boy, what wrong with you? Me a-go show you what me do with people who make me vex, then me a-go give you a choice: either you bring me the blasted heart by tomorrow, or you turn duppy food.”

• • • •

Barkodey, me buddy,
Barkodey
Them send me to shave you,
Barkodey
With me ten pound razor,
Barkodey
And if you laugh me go cut you.
Barkodey

—Call-and-response chant

Sensation was returning to Tony’s feet in the form of an almost unbearable prickling. He’d been able to move his upper body for a few minutes now, to turn his head away from the ritual that Rudy was performing in front of him, but with his arms shackled to the chair he was sitting in, he hadn’t been able to shield his ears from the sounds of a knife ripping through skin or his nose from the smells of blood and human waste. Melba had been allowed to scream only once. After that, Rudy had told her to keep silent, and impossibly, she had. The drug that he had been feeding her had that much power to place her will under his control, though her muscles trembled and twitched with reaction from the pain he was inflicting on her. Most horribly, since Rudy had ordered her to lie perfectly still on the dining table, she had made no attempt to escape over the last minutes as Rudy methodically flayed her alive.

Tony whimpered as he stared transfixed at the living anatomy lesson that Melba had become. Insanely, he remembered a lecturer at college informing them, “The average human has about twenty square feet of skin weighing about six pounds.” Tony’s medically trained mind persisted in identifying the structures that Rudy had exposed with his knife: anterior tibialis of the lower leg; the long bulge of the rectus femoris muscle of the thigh; external obliques covering the stomach region; flap of the platysma myoides muscle layered over chin and clavicle; sterno-cleido mastoid just visible behind the ear. The fat pads and gland tissue that had been her breasts had come off with the skin covering her torso. Lips, eyelids, and hair had come away, too. Her exposed eyeballs goggled, and lipless, her exposed teeth and gums gave her a ghastly grin. The drug that incapacitated her must also do something to delay shock. Deprived of their skin, the largest organ of the human body, any other human being would have died by now. Tony clenched his eyes shut and prayed that the ordeals both he and Melba were suffering would soon come to an end.

Rudy said, “Look at me, my brother.” Tony didn’t dare disobey. He opened his eyes, feeling the tears start unbidden as he looked at Melba’s body again. Arms gory to the elbow, Rudy smiled happily at Tony from the other side of the table. “This is what I go do to your Ti-Jeanne if you nah get that heart for me.”

“No!” Tony had control of his vocal cords again.

“No? All right, Master Tony, tell you what. Me just decide a next thing, yes? You know say me can’t make word get out that a man try to cheat me and I make he get off scot free, right? I wouldn’t be able to keep no discipline if I carry on like that.”

Tony stared at him, chest heaving.

“So. You have to get punish. You go kill your Ti-Jeanne for me, boy. Is the price for your own life. Kill she clean, or I go do it like this.”

Tears started down Tony’s cheeks again.

“Like you nah like the sound of that, neither. Look like I go have to set my watchdog ’pon you to make sure you nah try to cheat me again. Me soon come back, Tony.” He disappeared through a door that led to the back of his office, returned wheeling a small, black-painted metal gurney, just wide enough for the bowl that was balanced on its top. The bowl appeared to be unvarnished wood, about the size of a watermelon. It had designs incised on its surface. Its bottom was round. It was sitting inside a ring of cloth that held it steady. “Look my watchdog here,” Rudy told him cheerfully. “My duppy. It need lifeblood for it to have the vitality to do what I go ask it, and you go get to watch me feed it.”

He wheeled the gurney to the head of the dinner table, positioned it beside Melba’s left ear. “Melba, sweetness,” he cooed, “your punishment nearly finish now, darling. You is a strong woman, Melba. Almost two years you last. See what does happen when people defy me? But when you dead, darling, you go be free. Soon now. Just stretch out your left side neck for me there.”

Wet, red muscles glistening with fluids, Melba presented her neck to the knife. Tony thought he was going to be sick. Rudy tilted her chin toward the bowl. Melba’s eyes were now staring straight at Tony. He couldn’t read the expression on the weaving of muscles that were her face.

With a quick slash, Rudy slit the woman’s jugular vein. Bright blood gouted into the bowl. An appalling sound came from it, like someone guzzling great amounts of liquid as fast as they could. Melba’s body relaxed into death.

“Yes, me duppy, yes,” Rudy crooned at the bowl. “Drink it all. Then me have a special job for you. Me want you to follow this man here, this Tony. Make sure him reap a heart out of a living body for me. Then make sure him kill the one named Ti-Jeanne.”

Rudy looked up at him briefly. The man’s eyes were inert lumps of coal, empty of emotion. He looked back down into the duppy bowl. “And if he ain’t do it, duppy? Well, first you feed on Ti-Jeanne, then you feed on him.”

The slurping noises from the bowl stopped. In its ring of cloth it rocked around and around, fast, then was still. A red mist seeped out of it and hovered in the air. Shapes coalesced from the mist, then melted back again: grasping, clutching hands; a rictus of a mouth, lips pulled back into a snarl; deranged eyes that appraised Tony like so much meat on a hook. Petrified, Tony was the monkey transfixed in the tiger’s frozen stare. Nothing in his world had prepared him for this creature from another reality. He was looking at a thing that must have died and never stopped dying, a thing that Rudy would not allow its natural rest, that he kept barely appeased with the blood of the living. Tony’s heart hammered in his chest. He could not endure another moment of that gaze.

The thing looked away, focused on Rudy with such malevolence that Tony didn’t understand how Rudy was still standing. Rudy sighed. For the first time that evening, he looked tired, older than he seemed. But he gave no sign of fear or fatigue, just stared calmly at the red, hovering mist. Then, butcher knife still in his hands, he strode casually over to where Tony was tied. Tony scrabbled his heels desperately against the floor, trying to shove the chair he was shackled in out of Rudy’s reach. The chair almost went over backward. Rudy reached out his free hand to right it. “Steady, brother, steady.” He knelt in front of Tony. “Good thing this material so dark, eh? The stain won’t show.” And he wiped both sides of the bloody knife clean on one leg of the pants he had given Tony to wear. “So tell me now, nuh? You go do this little job for me, or you go join Melba?”

Tony felt his throat closing. He couldn’t, he couldn’t. He made an inarticulate noise.

“What, Tony? You have to speak up loud so me and the duppy could hear you.”

“I, I’ll do it.”

“Good. I feel say we finally understand each other, me brother.” He freed Tony from the chair.

Tony stood carefully, on wobbly legs. His eyes kept being drawn to the body on the table. Two days ago he’d been a whole man. Now he felt as though his protective skin had been removed along with Melba’s. He would never feel so sure of himself again.

“Barry go give you back the hospital equipment,” Rudy said.

“Yes.” A sun in torment, the duppy whirled before his gaze.

“Go ’long, boy. Just know it go be following you.”

Tony nearly ran from the room.

Rudy wiped a gory hand on the leg of his pants. He’d need a new suit. He said to the duppy, “Never mind what I tell you before. Once he give the heart to the hospital, I want you to kill all of them: Ti-Jeanne, Tony, everybody.”

It didn’t make a noise, exactly. More something like the remembered sound of a wail of agony. Then it sharpened into an arc and poured itself at speed right through the wall to the street outside.