Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (49 page)

Zora found signboards in Haiti fairly easy to understand in French, but the English ones were a different story. As she wedged herself into a seat in the crowded tap-tap that rattled twice a day between Gonaives and Port-au-Prince, she found herself facing a stern injunction above the grimy, cracked windshield: “Passengers Are Not Permitted To Stand Forward While the Bus Is Either at a Standstill or Approaching in Motion.”

As the bus lurched forward, tires spinning, gears grinding, the driver loudly recited: “Dear clients, let us pray to the Good God and to all the most merciful martyrs in heaven that we may be delivered safely unto our chosen destination. Amen.”

Amen, Zora thought despite herself, already jotting in her notebook. The beautiful woman in the window seat beside her shifted sideways to give Zora’s elbow more room, and Zora absently flashed her a smile. At the top of the page she wrote, “Felicia Felix-Mentor,” the hyphen jagging upward from a pothole. Then she added a question mark and tapped the pencil against her teeth.

Who had Felicia been, and what life had she led? Where was her family? Of these matters, Dr. Legros refused to speak. Maybe the family had abandoned its feeble relative, or worse. The poor woman may have been brutalized into her present state. Such things happened at the hands of family members, Zora knew.

Zora found herself doodling a shambling figure, arms outstretched. Nothing like Felicia, she conceded. More like Mr. Karloff’s monster. Several years before, in New York to put together a Broadway production that came to nothing, Zora had wandered, depressed and whimsical, into a Times Square movie theater to see a foolish horror movie titled “White Zombie.” The swaying sugar cane on the poster (“She was not dead . . . She was not alive . . . WHAT WAS SHE?”) suggested, however spuriously, Haiti, which even then Zora hoped to visit one day. Bela Lugosi in Mephistophelean whiskers proved about as Haitian as Fannie Hurst, and his Zombies, stalking bug-eyed and stiff-legged around the tatty sets,
all
looked white to Zora, so she couldn’t grasp the urgency of the title, whatever Lugosi’s designs on the heroine. Raising Zombies just to staff a sugar mill, moreover, struck her as wasted effort, since many a live Haitian (or Floridian) would work a full Depression day for as little pay as any Zombie and do a better job too. Still, she admired how the movie Zombies walked mindlessly to their doom off the parapet of Lugosi’s castle, just as the fanatic soldiers of the mad Haitian King Henri Christophe were supposed to have done from the heights of the Citadel LaFerriere.

But suppose Felicia
were
a Zombie—in Haitian terms, anyway? Not a supernaturally revived corpse, but a sort of combined kidnap and poisoning victim, released or abandoned by her captor, her bocor, after three decades.

Supposedly, the bocor stole a victim’s soul by mounting a horse backward, facing the tail, and riding by night to her house. There he knelt on the doorstep, pressed his face against the crack beneath the door, bared his teeth, and
sssssssst!
He inhaled the soul of the sleeping woman, breathed her right into his lungs. And then the bocor would have marched Felicia (so the tales went) past her house the next night, her first night as a Zombie, to prevent her ever recognizing it or seeking it again.

Yet Felicia
had
sought out the family farm, however late. Maybe something had gone wrong with the spell. Maybe someone had fed her salt—the hair-of-the-dog remedy for years-long Zombie hangovers. Where, then, was Felicia’s bocor? Why hold her prisoner all this time, but no longer? Had he died, setting his charge free to wander? Had he other charges, other Zombies? How had Felicia become both victim and escapee?

“And how do you like your Zombie, Miss Hurston?”

Zora started. The beautiful passenger beside her had spoken.

“I beg your pardon!” Zora instinctively shut her notebook. “I do not believe we have met, Miss . . . ?”

The wide-mouthed stranger laughed merrily, her opalescent earrings shimmering on her high cheekbones. One ringlet of brown hair spilled onto her forehead from beneath her kerchief, which like her tight-fitting, high-necked dress was an ever-swirling riot of color. Her heavy gold necklace was nearly lost in it. Her skin was two parts cream to one part coffee. Antebellum New Orleans would have been at this woman’s feet, in private, behind latched shutters.

“Ah, I knew you did not recognize me, Miss Hurston.” Her accent made the first syllable of “Hurston” a prolonged purr. “We met in Archahaie, in the hounfort of Dieu Donnez St. Leger, during the rite of the fishhook of the dead.” She bulged her eyes and sat forward slack-jawed, then fell back, clapping her hands with delight, ruby ring flashing, at her passable imitation of a dead man.

“You may call me Freida. It is I, Miss Hurston, who first told you of the Zombie Felix-Mentor.”

Their exchange in the sweltering crowd had been brief and confused, but Zora could have sworn that her informant that night had been an older, plainer woman. Still, Zora probably hadn’t looked her best, either. The deacons and mothers back home would deny it, but many a worshipper looked better outside church than in.

Zora apologized for her absentmindedness, thanked this—Freida?—for her tip, and told her some of her hospital visit. She left out the message in the dirt, if message it was, but mused aloud:

“Today we lock the poor woman away, but who knows? Once she may have had a place of honor, as a messenger touched by the gods.”

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” said Freida in a forceful singsong. “No! The gods did not take her powers away.” She leaned in, became conspiratorial. “Some
man,
and only a man, did that. You saw. You know.”

Zora, teasing, said, “Ah, so you have experience with men.”

“None more,” Freida stated. Then she smiled. “Ah bo bo. That is night talk. Let us speak instead of daylight things.”

The two women chatted happily for a bouncing half-hour, Freida questioning and Zora answering—talking about her Haiti book, the sights of New York, the smell of the turpentine harvest in the Florida pines. It was good to be questioned herself for a change, after collecting from others all the time. The tap-tap jolted along, ladling dust equally onto all who shared the road: mounted columns of Haitian Guards, shelf-hipped laundresses, half-dead donkeys laden with guinea-grass. The day’s shadows lengthened.

“This is my stop,” said Freida at length, though the tap-tap showed no signs of slowing, and no stop was visible through the windows, just dense palm groves to either side. Where a less graceful creature would merely have stood, Freida rose, then turned and edged toward the aisle, facing not the front but, oddly, the back of the bus. Zora swiveled in her seat to give her more room, but Freida pressed against her anyway, thrust her pelvis forward against the older woman’s bosom. Zora felt Freida’s heat through the thin material. Above, Freida flashed a smile, nipped her own lower lip, and chuckled as the pluck of skin fell back into place.

“I look forward to our next visit, Miss Hurston.”

“And where might I call on you?” Zora asked, determined to follow the conventions.

Freida edged past and swayed down the aisle, not reaching for the handgrips. “You’ll find me,” she said, over her shoulder.

Zora opened her mouth to say something but forgot what. Directly in front of the bus, visible through the windshield past Freida’s shoulder, a charcoal truck roared into the roadway at right angles. Zora braced herself for the crash. The tap-tap driver screamed with everyone else, stamped the brakes and spun the wheel. With a hellish screech, the bus slewed about in a cloud of dirt and dust that darkened the sunlight, crusted Zora’s tongue, and hid the charcoal truck from view. For one long, delirious, nearly sexual moment, the bus tipped sideways. Then it righted itself with a tooth-loosening
slam
that shattered the windshield. In the silence, Zora heard someone sobbing, heard the engine’s last faltering cough, heard the front door slide open with its usual clatter. She righted her hat in order to see. The tap-tap and the charcoal truck had come to rest a foot away from one another, side by side and facing opposite directions. Freida, smiling, unscathed, kerchief still angled just so, sauntered down the corridor between the vehicles, one finger trailing along the side of the truck, tracking the dust like a child. She passed Zora’s window without looking up, and was gone.

“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”

Mouth dry, head aching from the heat and from the effort of reading her own chicken-scratch, Zora turned the last page of the manuscript, squared the stack and looked up at her audience. Felicia sat on an hourglass root, a baked yam in each hand, gnawing first one, then the other.

“That’s the end,” Zora said, in the same soft, nonthreatening voice with which she had read her novel thus far. “I’m still unsure of the middle,” she continued, setting down the manuscript and picking up the Brownie camera, “but I know this is the end, all right, and that’s something.”

As yam after yam disappeared, Felicia’s eyes registered nothing. No matter. Zora always liked to read her work aloud as she was writing, and Felicia was as good an audience as anybody. She was, in fact, the first audience this particular book had had.

While Zora had no concerns whatsoever about sharing her novel with Felicia, she was uncomfortably aware of the narrow Victorian casements above, and felt the attentive eyes of the dying and the mad. On the veranda, a bent old man in a wheelchair mumbled to himself, half-watched by a nurse with a magazine.

In a spasm of experiment, Zora had salted the yams, to no visible effect. This Zombie took salt like an editor took whiskey.

“I’m not in your country to write a novel,” Zora told her chewing companion. “Not officially. I’m being paid just to do folklore on this trip. Why, this novel isn’t even set in Haiti, ha! So I can’t tell the foundation about this quite yet. It’s our secret, right, Felicia?”

The hospital matron had refused Zora any of her good china, grudgingly piling bribe-yams onto a scarred gourd-plate instead. Now, only two were left. The plate sat on the ground, just inside Felicia’s reach. Chapter by chapter, yam by yam, Zora had been reaching out and dragging the plate just a bit nearer herself, a bit farther away from Felicia. So far, Felicia had not seemed to mind.

Now Zora moved the plate again, just as Felicia was licking the previous two yams off her fingers. Felicia reached for the plate, then froze, when she registered that it was out of reach. She sat there, arm suspended in the air.

“Nnnnn, nnnnn, nnnnn,” she said.

Zora sat motionless, cradling her Brownie camera in her lap. Felicia slid forward on her buttocks and snatched up two yams—choosing to eat them where she now sat, as Zora had hoped, rather than slide backward into the shade once more. Zora took several pictures in the sunlight, though none of them, she later realized, managed to penetrate the shadows beneath Felicia’s furrowed brow, where the patient’s sightless eyes lurked.

“Zombies!” came an unearthly cry. The old man on the veranda was having a spasm, legs kicking, arms flailing. The nurse moved quickly, propelled his wheelchair toward the hospital door. “I made them all Zombies! Zombies!”