Leaving the little verandah where he had gone for a breath of air, only to find more of the crowded city’s suffocating heat, Peter advanced the short distance to the door and opened it. The man confronting him was a Haitian, tall, slender, and very black.
“You’re back already?” asked Peter, startled, in Creole. It came out almost like a rebuke.
“With good news, m’sieu.” Nodding briskly, Metellus Dalby stepped past him into the room, then spun about to face him. “There is to be a big meeting of the cult this very night. You must accompany me to it!”
The bright gibbous moon illuminated the scene of two men, one white, one black, staring at each other. Then the Haitian spoke again, more slowly. “But there is something we must do first, mon ami.” From a pocket of his baggy trousers he withdrew a pint bottle of some dark liquid.
Peter nodded. “How long will it take?”
“I will apply the first coat now, another about noon, and a third before we begin the journey.” His smile broadened into a shining crescent moon. “You will look like one of my people when I finish, I promise you that. And while it will itch, a little, it will not inconvenience you.”
“What about my sharp nose, my thin lips?” For the first time, Peter saw them as he feared a non-Caucasian might see them, not handsome, but marks of alien origin.
“Haitians come in all shapes, my friend. Some of our ladies on the Mardi Gras floats could win prizes anywhere in the world. You’ve seen them.”
The Pension Etoile was on the Champ de Mars, and, that being part of the Mardi Gras route, Peter involuntarily glanced out the window, as if half-expecting to see the marching bands and gaudy floats in full force. His companion smiled again, showing those whiter than white teeth.
“It may burn a little, this vegetable dye,” Metellus warned. “But not for long. You’ll be comfortable again soon, I promise.” Peter wondered what sort of errands had made Metellus so familiar with the stuff and its use. Whatever they might have been, they only made Metellus exactly the sort of person who would know how to help him on a gambit such as he contemplated. Like the CIA, anthropologists sometimes had to deal with people who could get things done when there were only dubious ways to get them done.
Peter took the two or three steps to the bed, removed the top part of his pajamas, and lay down on his back. Pulling the cork from the bottle and leaning like a masseuse over his client, this man he looked on more and more as a friend, Metellus began the process of darkening those parts of the white man’s body that would be revealed by short-sleeved attire. As he did so, he talked.
“What is to happen tonight, m’sieu, will interest you, I am certain. These people plan a special meeting in which they will call upon the Old Ones to present themselves. There is a line you will hear, and you must be ready to join in the first time you hear it. That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons, even death may die. I heard it from Tiburon, on the Southern Peninsula, who told me it was not for the ears of just anyone. You do not want to sound like it is new to you. That is not dead,” he repeated, coachingly, “which can eternal lie, and with strange eons, even death may die.”
“Meaning?” Peter asked with a frown.
The Haitian shrugged. “Who knows, exactly? But they know its meaning, never fear. And perhaps after tonight we, too, shall know.” He fell silent, giving the white man the chance to repeat the formula to himself silently till he knew it.
When the bottle was empty, Metellus stepped back from the bed to look Peter over, then nodded. “We should plan on being there before dark, so we can show my work off to best advantage, eh? We can use my Jeep to take us as far as Furcy, then we’ll have to walk a few miles. Those mountain trails are not easy, as I believe you know.”
Paying as little mind as he could to his tingling skin, Peter looked at the mirror while speaking to his partner. “What time did you leave there tonight?”
“Just after midnight.”
Peter glanced at an alarm clock on his chest of drawers, subtracting the minutes it was off by. Its lazy hands now stood at five minutes to five, and Metellus had been here how long? Forty-five minutes? A little more? “So we want to be there when?”
“I should plan on picking you up about three o’clock this afternoon, I think.”
Nodding matter-of-factly, Peter opened the top of the chest of drawers, a storage place with absolutely no security, to take out his billfold. From it he handed the Haitian some gourd notes. “Fill up the gas tank, Metellus. Better put some food in the Jeep as well. There’s no telling what we may be getting into, eh?”
“Thanks, boss,” he answered with a note of irony, noticing that there was more there than needed for the tasks Peter had stipulated. He left, and Peter’s sole companion was once again the humidity, which by now seemed to have gotten the better of the dogs, who had fallen silent. Maybe he’d be able to get some sleep now. When the dye on his skin seemed to be dry enough, Peter returned to his bed and dozed till mid-morning, knowing he would probably not sleep at all in the night ahead of him. Who or what, he wondered, were the “Old Ones” his Haitian friend had talked about? Old gods, older than the conventional Obeah pantheon, to be sure. But which gods? What kind? It later seemed vaguely to him that his dreams that morning tried to give him some hint, but he could not remember.
Come five minutes to three that afternoon, Metellus turned his Jeep into the Pension driveway, and Peter, standing ready, stepped right into it. Several of the little hotel’s other guests had stared unabashedly at Peter as he had descended the staircase from his second-floor room and walked through the downstairs hall to the door. No doubt they were startled at a white man having becoming a black one, but none questioned him, perhaps feeling it safer not to. As he slid onto the seat beside the driver’s, his Haitian friend nodded approval and said, “The dye worked well, I see. If I were you, I might be wondering how long it will take to wear off.”
“I have thought about it, now that you mention it.” Peter smiled as he made himself as comfortable as possible. The Jeep was an old one, open, with a fabric top to shield its two occupants from rain or sun.
“You may continue a Haitian for three or four days,” said Metellus, with the air of a doctor, showing his white teeth again in a grin.
“I can think of things I’d less rather be.”
“Eh?”
Peter realized he probably hadn’t phrased the remark properly in Creole. “Just so long as it works tonight,” he amended.
“Yes,” replied Metellus with surprising and sudden gravity, as he backed out of the Pension’s drive. “Just so long as the Old Ones don’t know who and what you really are.” Peter thought about that remark from time to time as the two of them traveled up the winding road to Petionville, where so many of the country’s wealthier citizens lived to escape the heat and squalor of Haiti’s capital. It lingered in his mind on the even longer climb over a narrow blacktop road to the mountain village of Kenscoff. And it jabbed at his mind now and then as Metellus, a skilled and careful driver, took the little vehicle up the final twisting climb to the end of the driving road at Furcy. At various times during the journey Peter had turned in his seat to peer down through the heat-haze hanging over the roofs of the capital, as if trying to penetrate the opaque mists of antiquity. He wondered why he was doing what he was doing. Did all anthropologists live dangerously? It was only missionaries who wound up in cooking pots, wasn’t it?