Walking on Sunshine Read online

  “When I have gone to bed. I have a lot of work this evening.”

  “I need to hit the store myself,” I said. I picked up my shopping bag full of stalker gear and slung it carelessly into my bedroom. “See you sometime.”

  I left the hotel and found a drug store, where I bought a thumb drive.

  And while my so-tender-hearted papa lay sleeping in his two-thousand-dollar-a-night bedroom, I hacked his laptop and downloaded everything new since the last time. With the thumb drive under my pillow, I curled up in my own bed, wondering what I could do to distract him for a day or two.

  I needed a day or two longer.

  I was very close to finding the lost vicomte . . . before the legal bomb my father had set went off.

  o0o

  The next night, all my plans came to nothing.

  I’d never seen anyone die before, not right in front of me.

  I had followed the trail in my papa’s files to the shabby storefront botánica in Chicago, where Jake lived and sold vodou herbs and advice. According to my papa’s files, the lost Vicomte Montmorency, Clarence Gide Sans-Souci de Turbin’s letters, sent back to France from the United States over the past eighty years, had named a Jacob Pierre, “Jake,” as Vicomte Clarence’s traveling companion.

  And I’d found Jake. This Jake was very obviously that Jake, a frustrating, charming old man, clearly fucking-fou-nuts, and all the more charming because of it.

  For two weeks I had been begging Jake to let me meet the pretend-Clarence. Jake had hinted and promised and delayed, but he never introduced me.

  Was “Jake” in fact himself the vicomte? He seemed old enough. I couldn’t tell if Jake was Clarence, the man I was looking for, or perhaps Jake was Clarence’s friend and traveling companion, or if this man was just nobody, pleased to have a hot little French girl hanging round his botánica, stringing me along so that I would continue to visit him.

  And now he was dying.

  In my stalker dark-green cargo pants and shirt, I walked into the shop, making the bell jingle on the door. Outside, a heavy summer rain fell on the hot pavements. I half-closed my umbrella and let it drip, listening to silence, smelling the dried herbs. Nobody was in the front room.

  I found Jake on the cot in the back room.

  I said, “If this is a bad time—”

  Then I smelled that bad hospital smell.

  “I won’t be alive. Wait.” He smiled, and the lost child inside me was warmed for a moment. “You look full of mischief tonight,” he wheezed. I sat in a folding chair beside his cot, opening my dripping umbrella and setting it on the floor behind me. “Tell me how you’re gonna break the law this time, kouzen. Burgle Yoni’s hotel room, eh?”

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I came to see you.”

  He looked me over slowly. I believed this old man saw more of me than anyone else could see—saw and liked me—no, he saw and accepted me. “Get me a glass of water.”

  I scampered to fetch it. When I came back, he was panting heavily, but he only sipped the water. Then he smacked his lips.

  “Bon. Now sing to me. That lullaby I taught you.” He laid his hands beside him and closed his eyes, still smiling.

  So I sang the turtle song. Some of the Kreyol words were familiar to my French ear. “Gae, gae soulangae,” I sang, “bailé cheminlà. M’a dit li, oui, m’a dit li, cowan li connais parlé ti cowan li connais parlé” The . . . turtle talks? What did it mean?

  Jake seemed to like it. He reached over and patted my hand along with the song. I put my heart into singing for him.

  His gaunt, seamed black face lost color by the minute. When I stopped singing, he looked toward the door.

  He must be waiting for someone. I prayed it would be the other old black guy who came here sometimes to play checkers and who ignored me, and not the scary tattooed black guy. That young guy was always exquisitely dressed, and he disapproved of me and also ignored me. Why did Jake want me here?

  It could only be that he meant to introduce me to the Clarence-vicomte-claimant. My hope flamed.

  Jake looked at me and nodded, as if he heard my thought. “Just wait. You’ll meet your man. You promise to help him get his birthright?”

  I nodded vigorously. “That’s why I came.” Suddenly my mission seemed like an angry teenager’s prank. Jake was dying. I pulled up a chair and put it where Jake directed, on one side of his cot. Tears stung my eyes.

  The doorbell jingled.

  Jake’s elderly friend shuffled into the back room. When he saw Jake, his face transformed as if it were melting. His thin shoulders slumped. He let the carpet bag he carried fall to the floor beside my umbrella. He set another folding metal chair across Jake’s cot from me, ignoring me, his dark face in shadow under that horrible old hat.

  The two men looked at one another. The air sizzled. I imagined I could feel the bond between them sharpen the air.

  Jake wheezed on the cot. Every time I glanced away to look at his friend and looked back, Jake appeared thinner and grayer and nearer to death. I began to believe Jake’s claim that the lwa Baron Samedi dwelt in his body to keep it alive.

  His friend never looked at me.

  I was intensely aware now that the old checkers friend, too, resented my presence. He had hung around the shop during these past two weeks, never as hostile as Jake’s other friend, the young one, but always sending me that go-away vibe. Ignoring me.

  I realized his heart was breaking over Jake.

  I was ashamed of my easy tears. I was exactly the trivial, shallow-minded person he must think me. How could I claim to grieve for Jake, whom I knew so slightly, in the face of this old man’s terrible loss?

  Jake pulled in a shuddering, slow, shallow, rattling breath.

  I should not look at his friend. He didn’t want me to, I could tell. I couldn’t make myself leave, but I didn’t have to offend him worse by looking at him.

  So of course I looked at him.

  Tears ran down his face. I think his tears hurt me more than my own did. I imagined the squeeze, the stab through the heart he felt every time Jake tried to breathe. He had a dragonfly tattooed under one eye. His fists opened and closed. I saw that he was younger than Jake, far too young to be the true vicomte.

  So, did that mean the man I was looking for was Jake? Merde! Why did he have to die now?

  My papa would win his lawsuit without a fight.

  I hated the thought.

  “Okay,” Jake said to his friend in a faint voice, but briskly. “Got to get this out fast. I’m turning you over to a new mambo, one who can bring you to your place.” He gave a chuckle that made me shiver. “Your plan, your dream. What you always wanted. And she will balance the initiation you got from me.”

  “What?” His friend’s voice trembled. “No! I’ll be free now. You promised.”

  “Free of me. Not free of destiny.”

  “I don’t want to be free of you!” old checkers guy protested, anguish in his voice.

  “Well, you will be.” Jake chuckled. “You have work to do. You wouldn’t learn by rubbing chicken blood on that hard skull of yours. I tried to soften it by putting you to work with women, but no. I suppose,” he said, “I should have been working on your heart, not your head, but I promised myself I wouldn’t fuck with your heart, and I haven’t. If you love me, you little turd, it’s been all your own idea.”

  “I love you, you miserable old fuck,” the other muttered. “But I won’t—” I could almost see the words coming up into his withered throat and sticking there. He shook his head resignedly. “What can I do for you now?”

  “I want,” Jake said firmly, then coughed. “I want a proper burial. I want to dwell under the waves. I want to piss off the ancestors by sitting at their table.” His voice sank again. “You’ll have to take care of it. There’s nobody else.”

  His friend’s face worked. “You know I don’t know how.”

  Jake showed his teeth. “Google it, motherfucker.”

  His fri
end looked shocked and hurt. He hunched his shoulder in my direction.

  “Never mind her yet,” Jake said.

  Yet? So Jake did intend to reveal something. I was desperately eager to know which of them was the vicomte—they might both be old enough—well, the friend looked much younger than Jake. Younger by the moment.

  I couldn’t think this through. The room was too full of emotion. In the silence, summer rain beat on the roof, lashed the shop window, and washed the pavement outside.

  Old checkers guy must have pulled off his hat when I wasn’t looking. The bare lightbulb shone on his hairless head. He seemed young enough to be Jake’s son now. Maybe that was because Jake was so near death.

  He looked Jake in the eye. “You saved me and I served you.”

  Jake nodded. “And now you’ll serve somebody else. You have to give it to somebody, boy. When you stop loving somebody, you’re dead. When a mortal man stops loving, he begins to die. When a lwa stops serving, they put him down. Like a dog gone bad.” Jake gave a laugh, his voice strengthening. “Don’t think they can’t. Lwas are made, not born.”

  “I don’t want to be a lwa! I was a fool—only a boy! I changed my mind! You know that!”

  “Too late. Eh, it’s no different from being human. Long as you know your purpose. So eighty years ago, for one night, you wanted to be a god. It’s done. It won’t stop just because you chickened out. You have a long life ahead of you,” Jake said, and his friend groaned a groan that seemed to come up from his shoes. Jake continued relentlessly, “This has been a vacation, a romp in the playground. Now you’ll work.”

  “You can’t make me,” his friend burst out.

  “She’ll make you,” Jake said, nodding to me. “Her job is to make you fit for it.”

  Wait, what? How had I gotten into this? I would make him do what? What was Jake up to?

  “That?” checkers guy said scornfully, jerking his head in my direction. He sounded less sure and more frightened. I was utterly fascinated. “She knows nothing of vodou. No.”

  Jake coughed, making his cot shake. “I was charged.” He stopped and wheezed for a while. When he got his breath back he said, “I was charged with keeping you moving. Training up your skills.”

  His friend went still. “We ran away.”

  “You ran away. I had to keep you on the job.”

  “Job?” the other said incredulously. “Riding freight trains? Fighting in bars? Seducing women? Sleeping in ruins, in rags?”

  Jake dismissed his scorn. “You loved it.”

  “You loved it. I followed you. I had no one else.” After a pause his friend whispered, “I have no one else.”

  “But I can’t take you all the way.” Jake didn’t sound in the least penitent or angry or disturbed. He sounded . . . gleeful.

  Checkers guy was shaking. “Jake, don’t,” he squeezed out. His shiny aluminum briefcase tipped over with a crash.

  I glanced down at it. Didn’t he bring a carpet bag?

  I saw that the briefcase had knocked over Jake’s glass of water. Hurriedly I picked it up.

  I heard Jake say, “I’ve given her your leash.”

  The other sprang up off his chair in one swift, terrifying movement.

  I looked up from mopping water with the edge of Jake’s blanket.

  In place of old checkers guy, young scary tattooed guy stood there, glaring at Jake. Old checkers guy was gone.

  I went cold, as if a truck had roared past me within an inch. I stared across Jake’s cot at the man.

  Jake’s words rang in my ears. Leash?

  Wait, this was the old friend, right? Not the young one who hated me already!

  I stared at him, afraid to see what I saw.

  This was indeed the young friend.

  But I had watched the old one come shuffling in! I’d watched his tears trickle through his wrinkles! I remembered his hat coming off . . . or had it?

  This man was twenty-something, also shaved bald, with a tattoo on one cheekbone and a diamond stud in the other ear, wearing a crisp white linen shirt that could barely contain his biceps.

  But his face, too, was wet with tears.

  The anguish in his expression struck at my heart.

  His fists punched down toward the floor at his sides. It was a strange gesture. Not scary at all. Now, he seemed more like a frightened, angry child who knew he was going to lose the fight, and he hated it, and he had too much dignity to scream or cry or beg.

  “Don’t.”

  His voice was the same.

  The old man, the young man, they were the same.

  Somehow he had changed his appearance, right here in front of me.

  I prickled all over.

  “It’s been fun, kouzen.” There was a world of love in Jake’s voice.

  The other man gave a sob.

  Jake slanted his eyes toward me. His hand turned over on the blanket and his fingers twitched.

  Very carefully, I slid my hand into his cold, soft palm. Something inside me begin to hum.

  “Being human takes more than breathing, eating, shitting, and fucking,” Jake said, sounding suddenly stronger. He breathed deeper.

  He looked at me. “Open him up,” he told me. His voice filled the room. “Bring him home.”

  “You old fool,” scary tattooed guy said in Kreyol. “You can’t serve Samedi now. He’ll suck you dry.”

  Jake chuckled. That wasn’t his voice anymore. I saw something flicker in the shadows behind his head. The shadows became light somehow, indescribably. He was not only alive—he was enormous. A fragile old dying man, the weight of a planet, tall as a great tree, lively as a bonfire. He reached out his other hand in a powerful gesture.

  Slowly, as if he were being dragged forward, scary tattooed guy edged closer.

  Jake’s hand shot out and snatched his hand.

  Now the three of us were locked in some kind of circuit, with many volts running between us through our clasped hands. For the first time I was afraid. Jake laughed, an unearthly laugh full of mischief and careless power, and also affection.

  This wasn’t Jake anymore.

  The creature possessing Jake’s body looked me over with shining eyes. This must be Samedi, whom Jake served.

  I stared back in panic. I didn’t even think of pulling my hand free. I knew I couldn’t.

  “Thaw this frozen heart,” the lwa said. “Before it ruins him.”

  Then the current cut off. My hand slid free of Jake’s lifeless grip. I heard ringing in my ears.

  Scary tattooed guy cried out and sank to his knees by the bed. He gripped Jake’s hand tightly, pressing his forehead to it.

  I seized my umbrella and ran out of the room, through the darkened botánica, out the jingling shop door—ran and ran back to the train and my hotel.

  VEEK

  I wept, helpless with rage and grief. Jake’s hand was cool in mine.

  With relief I heard the French girl bang the front door. My heart trembled in my breast. I followed her, turned the “open” sign to “closed,” and locked the door. I watched from the botánica window as she ran down the street. I hated to leave Jake’s body just yet, but I wanted to be perfectly alone to make my next phone call.

  First I called my roommate Baz. He didn’t answer. I tried to speak to his voicemail, couldn’t, hung up, and texted him instead. won’t b home 2nite Jake has died i must arrange abt the body.

  It was hard to go back into Jake’s room. There he lay, limp and quiet, his head lolling at the wrong angle, every muscle relaxed. I could smell that his bladder had given way. His smile, the strongest muscle in his body I would swear, now drooped with the rest of him.

  I watched him a long time. I wouldn’t put it past Samedi to visit his serviteur for one more minute, just to blanche my liver.

  At length, with one eye on the body, I opened my briefcase and found my tattered address book, and in it, one of the oldest entries, written in fountain pen more than eighty years ago.

  I took a
deep breath. What I was about to do terrified me. Only the sight of Jake’s body lying there, heavy as gold, foul and dangerous and saddening and cooling, could force me to make the call.

  “Bonjou,” said a woman’s voice in Kreyol.

  “Madame Vulcaine?”

  “Oui.” It couldn’t be the same one. Her daughter, perhaps. But she was my only contact.

  My bones were already jelly. “I have to inform you that your kouzen Jacob Pierre has passed on in Chicago. It has been some time since he was a regular celebrant in your house, but, I assure you, he had no other affiliation. You have the right to claim his remains.”

  There was a long silence. “Who is calling, please?”

  I couldn’t possibly know this woman. She was very likely not born yet when I fled New Orleans with Jake, eighty years before. Yet her voice had that same thick mambo authority. I took another deep breath.

  “I am Clarence Gide Sans-Souci de Turbin.” I paused, then, with the greatest reluctance, gave her my vodou name.

  She made no comment. “Can you prove his identity to me?”

  I gave her Jake’s vodou name.

  This silence was even longer. “I see. The address?”

  I told her. “He asked for a proper vodou burial.” At once, I wished I could recall the words.

  Now I was committed.

  “Did he?” The mambo’s voice dripped scorn. “And who will help me bury him? Now that you have kept him away from his family all these years?”

  I clenched my teeth, then opened my mouth, longing to hang up. “I will.”

  “Do you know how?”

  “I’ll google it,” I squeezed out.

  She said, “Good luck.” I shared her evident skepticism about the internet’s accuracy regarding anything vodou. She said, “Then you know you must wash the body. You are his nearest living relative. It must be done immediately.”

  “I know.” I took a deep breath. “What herbs must I use?”

  She told me. I knew they would all be in the jars on Jake’s wall. “And you must be present for the full nine days, to tell his life, so that he may become one of the ancestors.”

  Nine days! “I’ll be here—as much as I can.” I didn’t want to spend nine hours with her. And I had urgencies. My plan, my dream, as Jake called it.