Burial (62 page)

‘Sissy?' said Joe, in the brightest voice that he could manage.

Then, ‘Oh. I'm trying to get in touch with Sissy.'

Then, ‘Oh. I see. Oh, you're Loni. How're you doing, Loni? It's Papago Joe. Do you remember me? Papago Joe, from Phoenix? That's right, the Indian guy you met with Anthony Funicello. That's right. That's it How're you doing? Listen … if Sissy's not around, I need a favour. Do you happen to know anybody who can do a little jiggery-pokery for me? Know what I mean? I need a mama, that's right.'

He hesitated, clamped his hand over the receiver. ‘Sissy's cousin; quite a girl. She should be able to help us.' Then, ‘Hi, Loni. Yes, good. Well, I'm nearer Chicago than Miami.
Okay. That's okay. Well, give me both, in case she's not around any longer. Well, with Chicago you just don't know. For sure. Fine. Good. Thank you.'

He wrote down two names and addresses, thanked her again, and then put down the phone.

‘Get some sleep,' he suggested. ‘Tomorrow, we're heading for Chicago.'

We arrived at the brown-brick house near Avalon Park at a quarter past two the following afternoon. We had travelled the normal way: by American Airlines, paid for by Papago Joe's gold American Express card. I hadn't been able to face another
krrrakkkk
! through the Great Outside, not so soon after the last experience, and in any case Papago Joe said we were running low on the hallucinatory-death powder. We would need two substantial nose-fulls for our final confrontation with Misquamacus and Aktunowihio, and we didn't want to risk wasting it.

In spite of the devastation in Chicago, there was still a limited air-service flying into Midway, and we managed to catch a plane that was taking a collection of engineers and medics into the city. We sat in the back of the plane and made a point of avoiding any small-talk. We didn't like to tell any of these professional optimists that the damage they had seen so far was nothing, compared with what Misquamacus had in mind.

In a few weeks, even these ruins could have disappeared, and Chicago would be nothing but sandbars, rocks and grassland.

I had noticed something strange as we sat in the back of
the taxi, on our way through Chicago's southern suburbs; and I pointed it out to Papago Joe. People were walking around the streets, black people, some families, some couples, some by themselves. They were finely-dressed, most of them — in fact,
formally
dressed. Men in dark-blue three-piece suits and shirts and neckties, women in cream and yellow frocks, with plenty of petticoats. Children dressed in Sunday-meeting suits, with gloves, too. But none of them wore hats. Not one.

‘Looks like everybody's dressed up for church,' I remarked.

Papago Joe soberly shook his head.

‘Use some of that psychic sensitivity of yours,' he suggested. ‘Those people are
dead
.'

I looked around the streets with rising disquiet. ‘
Dead
' I asked him.

‘Sure … this is Misquamacus's end of the bargain. Doctor Hambone gave him black souls to help raise up Aktunowihio … and in return Misquamacus is raising the dead … just like it was foretold by Tavibo, in his Ghost Dance doctrine.'

On the corner of 82nd Street and Champlain Avenue — when we had almost reached Avalon Park — I saw a black family standing staring at nothing at all — grandfather, grandmother, uncles, aunts and children, even a little girl of three or four, with a lemon-yellow party-frock on, and yellow gloves to match. Their faces were grey and their eyes were the colour of red-hot embers in an ashy fire.

‘Zombies,' I said, in awe.

Papago Joe nodded. ‘Technically speaking, yes.'

‘All dressed up, but no hats.'

‘Of course not. They don't put a hat on you, do they, when they put you into your coffin?'

For some reason, I found that the terrible logic of these people's hatlessness made them even more frightening still.

We paid off the taxi-driver. Papago Joe said to him, ‘Careful who you pick up, my friend. Some of your customers may not be all that they seem.'

The taxi-driver pulled a dismissive face. ‘I know the difference between dead and alive. And I aint picking up no dead. Dead aint got the fare.'

I didn't know whether to laugh or not. It sounded like a Steve Martin movie:
Dead Men Don't Take Taxis
.

We climbed the stairs to Mama Jones' apartment. We had to ring the doorbell twice before it was answered by a handsome-looking black woman in a flowery summer dress. She was very well-groomed and smelled of expensive perfume.

‘Did you want something?' she asked.

Papago Joe said, ‘My name's Joe and this is Harry. We're on kind of a mission.'

‘A mission? What are you? Jehovah's Witnesses? I'm sorry … we got plenty of religion of our own right here. Apart from that, I believe in blood transfusions.'

‘No, no,' said Papago Joe. ‘We're not Jehovah's Witnesses. We're looking for Mama Jones.'

The woman looked at us with deep suspicion. ‘Who sent you?'

‘Sissy LaBelle. You know Sissy LaBelle?'

A flicker of the eyelids. ‘My grandmama knows Sissy LaBelle. I heard her speak of her, once in a while.'

‘That's Mama Jones, your grandmama?'

‘That's right.'

‘Is she here?'

‘I don't know. I'll go see.'

Out of his pocket, Papago Joe took the cockerel pendant that Doctor Hambone had given to Wanda. ‘Show her this,' he said.

But there was no need. A thin grey woman in a long grey gown was standing in the living-room doorway, resting on
the arm of a pretty young girl with a bow in her hair. The sun caught the lens of the old woman's smeary, magnifying spectacles, and made shining half-moons out of them.

‘Sissy LaBelle sent you? You'd better come along in.'

As she led us through to the living room, I glimpsed a thin black youth in a leather jacket standing in the kitchen, his hands by his sides. I nodded a greeting to him but he didn't seem to see me. He had sharply-razored hair and earrings, and he would have looked pretty smart if his face hadn't been so grey, and his eyes hadn't burned so dull.

The kitchen door was abruptly closed in my face. Mama Jones said, ‘Hurry along. That's Nat, my great-granddaughter's intended.'

‘He looks kind of — ‘I began, but Papago Joe silenced me with a sharp look.

Mama Jones stared up at me defiantly. ‘You can say it if you like. He looks kind of dead. The reason for that is, he
was
dead. He was buried in the hi-fi store where he works. He was dead and he was buried but he rose again. Hallelujah. Not that I'd have him here, if he wasn't the father of Trixie's baby.'

We sat by the fireplace with its creepy assembly of postcards and paintings and voodoo relics. Mama Jones lit a cigarette and blew smoke out of her nostrils while Nann and Trixie went into the kitchen to fix us some coffee. It was plain that Nann didn't approve of us coming here one bit, but this was Mama Jones' apartment and Mama Jones wanted to talk about Sissy LaBelle and all the people she had known on St Philip Street back in ‘the old days' — people like Chief Bo Rebirth and Evangeline Charmant and Jack Quezergue — which sounded like a useful name to know when you were playing Scrabble.

Eventually, though, Mama Jones sat back and said, ‘You didn't come here to talk nostalgia, though, did you?'

‘No, ma'am,' said Papago Joe.

‘You're Injun, aren't you?' Mama Jones asked him.

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘But you aint?' (turning to me).

‘No, ma'am, I'm not.'

‘Thought not. No aura.' Mama Jones sucked at her cigarette, and coughed. Then she said, ‘I ask myself, what do an Injun and a white man want with a voodoo woman? And I answer myself, it's because of the Ghost Dance, the Day of All Shadows, the day of dragging-down, that's why it's because.'

‘Well, you're right,' said Papago Joe.

‘We're looking for Doctor Hambone,' I put in.

‘You mean you're looking for the zombie of Doctor Hambone? Because Doctor Hambone he was a friend of Toussaint L'Ouverture, and he died a long, long time ago.'

‘Zombie, whatever,' shrugged Papago Joe.

Mama Jones eyed us narrowly. She must have realized that we knew quite a lot about the Ghost Dance and Doctor Hambone; and about spirits and spirit manifestations in particular, because you can't usually sit in your living room drinking coffee and start talking about zombies without people raising an eyebrow or two. But neither Joe nor me were raising any eyebrows.

‘What do you want Doctor Hambone for?' asked Mama Jones. ‘He's one magical son-of-a-bitch, I hope you know that.'

Papago Joe explained. It wasn't easy — and after all, most of it was guesswork; but Mama Jones was a patient listener, and when Joe had finished she sat and smoked and nodded, and lit another cigarette from the butt of the one before.

‘You got it all worked out, pretty well,' she said. ‘Doctor Hambone and Maccus met each other way back centuries ago; and worked out a common destiny for red men and black men. That was on the day we call Soul Day, even now. But then Doctor Hambone got himself involved with the
Catholics and the miracles of Christ, and decided he had more of a taste for God's power than he did for the power of Gitche Manitou. He went back on his word. He started to work for the white men, tracking down Indian wonderworkers and scotching their magic.

‘That went on till the Injuns caught him and persuaded him to change his mind. Maybe persuaded is too kind a word. Those Santee wonder-workers took him to the edge of space and back, to the very limits of the cosmos, believe me, where things are frothing that you can't even
think
about without going crazy.

‘Now, you're right, he's given all the souls that he owns to the Shadow Buffalo, or whatever you want to call it, the Injun god of darkness; and together they're pulling down the white man's world, brick by brick.'

‘And you're
pleased
? I asked her.

She turned and looked at me with rheumy, crowlike eyes. ‘You don't have any idea what black people have suffered, over the years. You don't know what Chicago was like, back in the slum days, and it's still no better, if you're poor and you're black. There are black babies being born on Grand Avenue with a crack habit, sir, even now, even today, and if that's the white man's world then we don't want to live in it.'

‘So what are you going to do?' I asked her. ‘Are you going to live like the Indians used to live, in tepees? Do you know how
cold
it can get, in a tepee, on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the dead of winter? And how are you going to get around? Are you going to learn to ride palominos? Are you going to catch buffalo for lunch? Can you imagine what it's going to be
like
, for Christ's sake? No hospitals, no sanitation, no schools, no highways, no railroads, no supermarkets? Are you seriously trying to tell me that you want your granddaughter and your great-granddaughter and your great-great-granddaughter to live in the Stone Age?'

‘It's revenge,' said Mama Jones, fiercely. ‘They took us from Africa like animals. They crushed our culture; they crushed our pride. But now look! Where are those highways now? Where are those proudful towers? We brung you low.'

‘Listen, Mama Jones,' I said, leaning forward. ‘History rolls on. You can't go back, ever. Your best hope is to change the way things are, not to destroy them. Do you want Trixie's baby to grow up without medication or dentistry or any hope of travelling the world? I don't know about Nat, but I'm damn sure that Trixie doesn't.'

Mama Jones said, ‘They crushed us. You goddamned white folks. You crushed us.' There were tears trickling down her wrinkled cheeks.

Papago Joe said, very gently, ‘Could we
talk
, do you think, to Doctor Hambone? Can you do that for us? Just
talk
'

She sniffed, wiped her eyes, and shrugged.

Papago Joe glanced at me. I took hold of Mama Jones' clawlike hand and stroked it. ‘If we could see him … talk to him. It sounds like he was compassionate, you know, as well as fierce. He protected a little white girl we met. Maybe we can work something out. You know — revenge, but not total revenge.'

At last Mama Jones nodded. ‘All right. But just talk, mind. Doctor Hambone has very superior magic, you understand, and if anything go wrong … well, I don't know if you know anything about eternal damnation, but Doctor Hambone has it in his power to give it you, c.o.d.'

We watched the television news in the kitchen while Mama Jones prepared the living room for our séance with Doctor Hambone. To my relief, Nat had retired to the bedroom. In New York, it looked as if the Upper East Side and the financial district had been totally flattened, and unconfirmed reports said that the Midtown Tunnel had flooded and the Brooklyn Bridge was partially collapsed. I watched
it with a growing numbness, like your feet growing cold on a snowy day — a feeling that I didn't realize until very much later was bereavement.

I could understand how the Indians had felt bereaved when they had lost their homelands, their magic, and thousands of their loved ones; and they hadn't even had anybody to tell them why.

Mama Jones beckoned us back to the living room. The drapes were drawn tight, so that the room was in smoky darkness, except for a single candle in a red glass globe.

Mama Jones had spread out a faded red candlewick tablecloth; and on this cloth she had arranged the skeleton of a cockerel, a tiny shrunken skull, and a row of cheaply painted statues of the saints.

‘Remember,' she said. Just talking, nothing else.'

She closed the door, and then we all took a seat around the table. We sat still for such a long time that my left foot began to go numb. Mama Jones said nothing, but stayed quite still, except for the faintest trembling of her left hand.