Brown Girl in the Ring Read online

  She took a step toward him. He swung the gun in her direction. “Stay there,” he ordered her. She ignored him. She kept walking.

  “Tony, don’t shoot,” Ti-Jeanne said. He risked a glance at her, swung the gun back at her. Mi-Jeanne reached him. She touched his arm. He turned and shot her full in the chest.

  “No!” Ti-Jeanne’s calm vanished. “Mummy!”

  Mi-Jeanne fell like a sack of bones. A red mist rose from her crumpled body. Ravening jaws, mad eyes, and clawing hands swirled in it. It slammed Tony to the floor. He screamed. The gun discharged into the ceiling.

  The thing sat on Tony’s chest, gibbering. Almost lovingly it licked his cheek. A strip of skin came away at its touch, disappeared into the swirling mass. The thing made a harrowing moan of pleasure. Terrified, Tony batted and clawed at it, but his hands just wafted through it and came away bloody.

  “La Diablesse. Soucouyant,” Ti-Jeanne muttered. This was her nightmare. Her own mother. And it was up to her to stop Mi-Jeanne. She threw herself to the ground, level with the duppy, and shouted, “Mummy! Stop this! Stop now!”

  For answer, the duppy dove at her face. Ti-Jeanne pulled back just in time. The hot wind of its attack swept by, millimetres from her cheek. Three of her plaits fell to the ground, sheared off clean. Her mother’s duppy had no choice. It was bound to do what Rudy told it to do. “Mummy, wait,” Ti-Jeanne begged hopelessly.

  To her surprise, the duppy held off for a moment. It was like watching a hurricane rage in a small space. Ti-Jeanne had the impression of a frenzied howling, although she heard nothing. But the duppy’s claws were already scrabbling at Tony’s whimpering throat. Its daughter’s plea held it for now, but in a second it would have to do its master’s bidding. It had to do what Rudy said. Ti-Jeanne thought fast, opened her mouth before she quite knew what she was going to say.

  “Rudy tell you to kill we, yes?”

  The maddened red eyes seemed to agree with her.

  “But he ain’t tell you when, Mummy, and he ain’t tell you where? Ain’t?”

  Had the duppy’s crazed swirling slowed down a little? Desperately Ti-Jeanne started talking again, hoping that some kind of plan would emerge from her babbling. “That’s right, that’s right. You could take we anywhere, kill we there, you still go be doing what Rudy tell you. Right, Mummy?”

  The duppy’s claws pulled back from Tony’s neck. It seemed to be waiting for Ti-Jeanne to say more. What could she say that would draw out their lives a little more, give them a chance?

  “You want, you want me to . . . free you, ain’t it? Find Rudy dead bowl and break it, so you don’t have to kill no more? Well, take we there before you kill we. Take we to Rudy place.”

  Tony grabbed her wrist. His eyes were wide. “Woman, like you mad, or what?”

  She felt his grip warm on her skin and looked into the eyes of this man she had loved beyond sense or reason. She thought of her grandmother’s body lying there with its head broken in, looked at Mi-Jeanne’s cooling body lying beside them on the ground.

  “Yes, I mad,” she answered him, firmly pulling her wrist from his grasp. She stood up. The duppy lifted itself off Tony’s chest and coalesced into a red fireball. It hovered above them, waiting. “I mad like France,” Ti-Jeanne said. “Mad like that old woman jumbie thing who used to be my mother. I mad at all of allyou for making me run around trying to save allyou, but allyou just digging yourselves in deeper, each one in he own pit.”

  “But Ti-Jeanne,” Tony protested, getting to his feet, “you can’t go to Rudy’s. He’ll just kill you. What’s that going to help?”

  “I tell you, I going. But me ain’t business with what you want to do, oui? You could try to run away again, I guess. But I bet you the duppy go find you.”

  Tony’s eyes slid to the fireball that was now tracing an impatient, sizzling orbit in the air.

  “Mummy,” Ti-Jeanne addressed it, “let me just go get the baby. He hungry. I could feed he while we walk.”

  The fireball moved out of the way. Refusing to look at the body of her mother lying on the floor, Ti-Jeanne went into her own room to get Baby; Tony and the fireball followed her as if attached to her apron strings. She stared down at her child in his crib. Leave him here alone, perhaps to starve to death, or take him with them? Baby looked at her, reached for her. Another life tied to her apron strings. She picked him up, put him into his Snugli, and slung it onto her body. “Let we go then, nuh?”

  The strange procession filed down the stairs and out into the night.

  Mi-Jeanne’s body was dead. If Ti-Jeanne did manage to free her mother’s soul from the calabash, where would it go now?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The operation was routine. It was their patient who was unusual. Margaret Wright was well aware that she was known for being an unflappable surgeon. During the next few hours, that reputation would be at stake. The media were following Premier Uttley’s heart transplant like hawks. They were expecting Dr. Wright to give a news conference as soon as she was out of the operating room. And they’d be talking to everyone who’d been in the OR, too. Every move Dr. Wright made would be on a newscast within hours. If she had snapped at a nurse, if she had made a crooked suture, all of Canada would know.

  Nothing could go wrong. She wouldn’t allow it. She had to make sure that her patient was smiling for the camera within days.

  Everything was going fine so far. Uttley had already received a portion of her donor’s bone marrow. Uttley’s leucocytes had not attacked the donor marrow; that was a good sign. When Wright transplanted the heart, white blood cells from Uttley’s bone marrow should migrate smoothly into the foreign organ, and vice versa, a chimerism that would trick her immune system into accepting the foreign organ so that body and heart could coexist peacefully.

  Now it was time for the transplant.

  Prepped for the surgery, Dr. Wright watched Dr. Fang do his part on the unconscious form of Premier Uttley. The surgical resident had never seen this operation done with a human heart. Wright knew that he wanted to be as involved as possible.

  The ventilator was already breathing for Uttley. Her entire body was covered in sterile white sheets, leaving exposed only her chest area: the surgical field. As always, the area of flesh that Wright could see didn’t look human. Best that way. Now was not the time for the people in the OR to focus on who their patient was. They needed to concentrate on what they were doing. Don Fang and Jim Nesbit, Wright’s associate surgeon, had already cut through the sternum and pried open the ribs with chest spreaders. They freed Uttley’s heart from its pericardial sac. Nesbit leaned closer to inspect the heart.

  “Hang on, Jim,” Wright said to him. “Let me get a look, too.” Jim made room for her. Yes. A clear case of cardiomyopathy. The flabby, distended sack that Uttley’s heart had become was about twice the size it should have been. It beat sluggishly.

  Jim made a “tsk, tsk” noise. “Whoo. Not a moment too soon, eh?”

  “Yup. Let’s get that baby out of there.”

  Wright stepped back out of the way. Jim sutured the ascending aorta and the right atrium, cannulated, injected the heparin to prevent blood clotting. Then he connected Uttley to the heart-lung bypass machine. He made the last few cuts and lifted Uttley’s heart out of her chest cavity. The perfusionist and the anaesthesiologist checked their readouts. Doing fine.

  “Okay, Margaret.”

  Dr. Wright stepped up to her place at the operating table. She took a deep breath, looked at the faces around her. “Here we go, guys.” She lifted the donor heart from its basin of sterile fluid. Through her gloves, it felt firm and chilled from having been kept cold.

  “So that’s what a healthy human ticker looks like,” muttered Dr. Fang. “Not so different from pig hearts.”

  “That’s all we are,” Jim chuckled. “Long pig.”

  Fang asked, “How old did they say the donor was?”

  “Fifty-seven,” Wright replied. “A bit old for this, maybe, but we were g
etting desperate, and she was healthy as a horse. Pathology says she never smoked, looked like she worked hard all her life, had arteries as soft as a baby’s. Suction, Jim.”

  As Jim suctioned the excess blood from the chest cavity, Wright lowered the heart in. Straightforward stuff, she told herself. Nevertheless, she anxiously reviewed the procedure aloud. She told herself it was for the benefit of her team. “Four anastomoses: fuse donor heart’s left atrial to patient’s left atrium; join the two right atrials; attach donor aorta to patient’s aorta; attach pulmonary arteries.”

  Jim looked at her over his mask. He knew all this, had worked with her hundreds of times. She took another breath for calm and positioned the heart.

  “Bonding stylus,” Jim said. The nurse handed him the pen—the “glue gun,” they called it—that would fuse the ends of the blood vessels together with fine lines of a nontoxic organic binder. The cellular growth factors suspended in the binder would promote accelerated healing.

  Jim started beading the first join line. Wright maintained pressure on the join as he went.

  First line done. Wright poured a bucket of ice-cold sterile saline solution on the heart. Jim finished bonding the left atrium, started on the right. Fang moved in closer to observe what he was doing. As a resident in training, he had to learn every step of the operation.

  “Watch that sinus node,” Wright cautioned Jim. Last thing they needed was to fuck with the heart’s electrical activity.

  Jim looked up at her again, eyes crinkling. “Little nervous there, Margaret?” The bastard was laughing.

  “Nah,” she lied with false calm. “Just got a hot dinner date. Gotta be out of here by seven.”

  “Tell you what: betcha we’ll be done by six. News conference at six-thirty, tell ’em baby’s had a change of heart and is looking fine. Pasta by seven, you and your sweetie heavy breathing by eight.” He bent his head back down over the surgical field.

  “You’re on,” Wright replied, moving in closer beside him to begin trimming the aorta of the donor heart.

  Finally the heart was hooked up. Wright placed the final lines in the pulmonary artery as they began to warm up Uttley’s new heart. Rich red oxygenated blood was pouring into the heart, feeding the cardiac cells that had been starving for the three and a half hours of the operation. Four hours was the maximum time they could let the heart stay ischemic before it would be damaged. Wright stood back, reached for the defibrillator paddles just in case. “Okay,” she breathed to the transplanted heart. “Do it, baby. Come on.”

  There was silence from the team in the operating room. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on Uttley’s new heart. Nothing happened. Then it quivered. Wright could feel her own heart thumping in her chest. Uttley’s heart jumped once, then began to beat.

  “Yes!” Jim said.

  “Contractions regular and strong,” Fang verified. “Congratulations, Doctors.”

  “Oh, God,” Wright sighed. “For a second there, I thought it wasn’t going to work. I’m getting too old for all this excitement.” She was sweating with the strain of the operation. The nurse swabbed her brow. “Okay, let’s close her up and get her out of here. I got a press conference to hold.”

  • • • •

  Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

  Number One stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

  “Who, me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  “Couldn’t be.”

  “Then is who?”

  —Children’s rhyming game

  “Yes, man. Tomorrow do me fine, Mr. Baines.” Rudy signed off. Slipped his palmbook into a pocket. The hospital was happy with their newest acquisition, had flown it to Ottawa immediately. The operation was under way, and he would get his money, with extra compensation for his three men who had been injured in the process of retrieving the heart. Tony had done what he was supposed to. Everything was going smooth like cool breeze, except that Tony hadn’t yet reported back that he’d killed the interfering girlfriend. The women in that family been giving me trouble from so long, Rudy thought. And the duppy wasn’t back in its calabash, either. What did that mean?

  “Crack!” Rudy shouted. Crack opened the office door and hobbled inside. The dark, mongoose-thin man looked like he’d been to war. He was using a cane to help him walk; he’d cracked his leg when Legbara dropped him. His arm and his side were a mass of bruises from the same fall. There were two fingerprint-shaped contusions under his chin, where Legbara had lifted him into the air. He complained of a persistent headache, for which the hospital had given him pills. And he was the best off of the three. He had insisted on coming right back to work. Gingerly, Crack stood to attention. “Yes, boss?”

  “You hear from Tony yet?”

  “Tony. No, boss.” Crack spat out the words as though they were bitter in his mouth. He had a personal vendetta against Tony now, for humiliating him like that at the hands of a woman. Rudy didn’t mind. It would make Crack more diligent in exacting retribution, if it turned out that Tony had disobeyed orders.

  What was really going on? Tony had obviously had the balls to kill the old woman; what was taking so long to finish off the rest of the job? And if he hadn’t done it, why hadn’t the duppy obeyed its orders and returned?

  “Shoulda never let she go back by she mother,” Rudy muttered.

  “Boss?”

  “Nothing.” He came to a decision. “You could drive?”

  “I could drive.”

  “Come, then. We go find Tony weself.”

  Crack grinned like a dog that had been offered a steak. He hobbled out of the room ahead of Rudy and pressed the button for the elevator. “Boss, if the so-and-so ain’t kill that leggo beast of a woman he have there, let me deal with the two of them, all right?”

  “All right.” Where the rass was the duppy?

  • • • •

  Lord, what a night, what a night,

  What a Saturday night!

  —Traditional song

  “People are going to see that thing herding us along,” Tony whispered in Ti-Jeanne’s ear, jerking a thumb in the direction of the fireball duppy that buzzed through the air behind them.

  “And that is all that worrying you? What they go do? Try and stop it?”

  “I guess not,” Tony replied in a regretful tone of voice.

  Pursued by the duppy, they were stumbling toward the southernmost end of the city as fast as they could. The streets were pretty empty, in that lull before the nightlife of the city awoke. Once or twice Ti-Jeanne had caught Tony eyeing dark alleyways as they went by. She knew he was trying to gauge the odds of running off and losing himself somewhere in the city before the duppy could catch up with him. Let him try, then, nuh? She didn’t care what he did. Every time she looked at him, an image of Mami’s body burned across her vision.

  Night had fallen again, even colder than the night before. Winter was slowly enveloping the city. Here and there a lone snowflake spiralled to the ground. As they walked, Ti-Jeanne opened her jacket and put Baby to nurse. Her breasts were achingly full. As Baby began to suckle, the familiar draining weariness tugged at Ti-Jeanne, as always when it had been a long time between feedings.

  Baby’s little fist opened and closed against her skin. He looked deeply into her eyes as though he were trying to communicate something. He seemed reluctant to take her breast. He’d suck a little, then spit out the nipple and whimper, staring up at her. She was probably taking him to his death. “Child, I sorry,” she whispered at him. He fussed and kicked. “She gone, doux-doux,” she said to him. She’d never used that endearment with him before. But now he was the only one of her family left, unless she counted the disembodied woman who was bound by Rudy’s obeah to kill her. “Mami gone.” She wanted to cry, but no more tears would come, only a sort of dry, gasping noise. Baby suckled halfheartedly and eventually fell asleep.

  They were out of the Burn now. They had passed Church Row and crossed Sherbourne, the boundary street that had given the Burn
its name; had gone down Jarvis Street past Allan Gardens and were passing the Clarion Hotel, where Mami’s friend Romni Jenny had claimed a living space on the main floor. Lamplight flickered from the first few floors of the hotel. The glassed-in main floor was covered with sacking, old curtains, and sheets to make a privacy screen. Against the jerky backlight, the shadows of the people inside moved eerily against the hangings. Outside in the driveway of the hotel, two old women and a younger man were barbecuing a haunch of meat over a fire pit. They looked at Ti-Jeanne and Tony, then up at the fireball. One of the old women crossed herself. The other two people gaped briefly, then became very interested in the precise placement of the blackened, smoking slab on its sheet of tin. In the city, it was best not to meddle in other people’s business. The smell of cooking meat made Ti-Jeanne’s mouth water. She hadn’t even had a chance to taste the soup that Mami had been cooking for her.

  Ti-Jeanne regretted that she couldn’t go in and tell Jenny that Mami was dead, but the duppy wouldn’t let them slow down, certainly wouldn’t let her out of its sight for a moment. She wondered how long it could delay its own hunger and the task it had been commanded to do.

  They were now angling through the Ryerson University campus, picking their way past the old stone buildings and the flickering lights of the tents that formed the squatters’ camps on the university grounds.

  They were coming up to the Strip; Yonge Street, the dividing line between the east and the west sides of the city. For some minutes now they’d been able to hear the buzz of voices and music and see the glow of light that rose from the Strip, above the city buildings. The Strip came alive at night. To Ti-Jeanne’s surprise, the duppy herded them down Yonge Street, instead of crossing it and continuing down to the lake by a less crowded route. Maybe it wanted to give them the chance to escape it in the crowd? But Ti-Jeanne was determined to go to Rudy’s place and make an end to this madness, one way or the other.