The hinte poke her head out of the branches and looked round. She did her silent call and seemed satisfied. She climbed down, gave Tan-Tan a hat she’d woved from flexible twigs while she was waiting. *The baby gone now?*
Tan-Tan frowned. “No, man. That is one backward place, you hear? Them ain’t have what I want.” She brightened up again. “But Abitefa, make I tell you what happen to me in Chigger Bite Village. Girl, it sweet can’t done; Tan-Tan the Robber Queen just done make masque ’pon Chigger Bite!”
That night she lay on her pallet in the dark, staring at the lantern flame. She was jittery for some reason, she couldn’t get restful. What was eating at her so, what? She tried to lull herself to sleep with the pictures leaping in the flickering light: She and Melonhead up in a wet sugar tree, arguing happily about whether it was humane for the Nation Worlds’ to exile their undesirables to a low-tech world where they were stripped of the sixth sense that was Granny Nanny. She and Quamina years younger, undressing their dollies and making them play doctor. The look of amusement on Aislin’s face when she found them. Chichibud on that first day on New Half-Way Tree, showing her how to roast meat on a spit and never saying that he hated it cooked. Her mother, Ione, letting her play with her colourdots, trying on lip colour after lip colour with her and laughing at the effect. The house eshu from Toussaint, singing her lullabies when she’d woken in terror from nightmares.
She missed the eshu. She hadn’t thought of the a.i. in years. She wondered what had happened once people had realised she and Antonio were gone off Toussaint, gone from out of that dimension for good.
She had acid stomach. The parasite baby again. She wriggled on the pallet irritably, trying to get comfortable. Her mind was only running backwards, backwards in time. The lantern flame guttered, flared with another image. Antonio, screening a picture book for her and rocking her to sleep as her eyes closed on the bright images.
The tears were sudden, the flood of them hot down her cheeks. Benta must have heard. She wheeked a question from her part of the nest. “I all right!” Tan-Tan called back. She quieted down, fixed her eyes on the flame, on the heavy-lidded little girl dozing securely in her father’s arms.
Daddy dead. You kill him.
She dropped her head to the bed, put her neckroll over her ears. But she could still hear the evil voice in her ears.
She longed to have the good daddy back. Her mind skittered over his attack the day before her birthday. Could she have prevented it? Stopped him? If she had come back early from running errands and kept him from the liquor-soaked fruit? If she hadn’t lingered with Melonhead out on the verandah? Her daddy was gone. She wept and rocked, despising herself. Bitter silent Tan-Tan howled accusations at her, and they were true, every one. Her doing, all hers.
Not a bit of sleep that night.
The sun was beginning to lay dapples of pink wash on the daddy tree leaves when she realised what she had to do to quiet the inner voice that never ceased. Bad Tan-Tan had given her peace for a while when she’d been saving Al. Chichibud had said, “When you take one, you must give back two.” She had to make up doublefold for what she’d done to Antonio. Helping Al had been the first small step. She had to go back to Chigger Bite.
Tan-Tan wrinkled up her nose, trying to make it smaller so she might inhale less. The evening air was a little chilly. She pulled the shawl that Benta had given her closer round her shoulders.
The alley behind Chigger Bite’s rum shop ran rank with slops. The door that led into the alleyway opened. Tan-Tan moved farther back in the shadows, trying to ignore the squelching feeling underfoot. Her alpagats would soak through soon.
A young woman with a hard, scarred face was standing in the doorway. She pulled aside her clothing, put a hand inside. A stream of urine jetted outward in a precise curve, guided by the two fingers she would have inserted between her labia. Arcing liquid caught the dying sunlight to glow a soft and glittering tangerine. The woman pulled her hand free and shook it. She put the fingers into her mouth, sucked meditatively. She wiped the hand dry against her overalls and rearranged her clothing. “Cookie!” she yelled into the rum shop, turning from the darkening evening to go back inside. “You motherass so-and-so, bring me a jerk pork and some stew peas there!” She slammed the door behind her, cancelling out the rhomboid of light that had been thrown through the open doorway onto the ground.
Full dark soon. Benta and Chichibud no longer worried when Tan-Tan was out this late, though. She climbed down the daddy tree at all hours now to relieve herself, stayed down on the ground in the bush quiet as long as it suited her. They’d given her a machète as tool and weapon, for she wouldn’t touch the knife that had been Janisette’s birthday present to her. Too besides, she knew how to wield a machète from years of farming corn.
She pulled her feet free of the putrid suction of mud, crept closer to the finely meshed wet sugar tree bark that made the rum shop’s back windowpane. She peered in. The shop owner was cutting slices off a cured haunch of meat, tossing them into a sizzling frying pan. Flames jumped in the brick oven. The man swiped his brow with one hand, took a swig from a mug beside the cutting board.
“Cookie!” a deep voice called from the rum shop’s front room. “Two pimiento liqueur!”
He put down his mug, wiped his mouth with his hand back. “Strong or weak?” he shouted.
“Your behind, I ever take weak yet? Strong!”
“Soon come, Japheth.” Cookie scooped the fried meat onto a plate, spooned a ladleful of stewed peas from a big pot onto the plate. Tan-Tan’s belly rumbled. From an earthenware urn the owner ladled garnet red pimiento liqueur into two mugs. He took the lid off his water bucket and topped up the pimiento liqueur with water. He took the plate and the two mugs into the front room.
Giving them weak but charging for strong. Oho; Tan-Tan had felt she would find something to entertain herself with this night. She go do for he. She tied her shawl around her body like an apron—easy thing to hide her machète in its folds. She tied a knot in a corner of the apron; let the owner think she was carrying money, he would be less suspicious.
The ground was dry where she was standing. She bent, paddled three fingers in the grime of the alleyway and rubbed it into her face. Chigger Bite people never seemed quite clean, oui. She wouldn’t want to stand out.
Her heart was starting to throb with the excitement of what she was about to do. She breathed in deeply for calm, pulled her scarf down low on her forehead to hide her features a little. She hunched her shoulders and cast her eyes meekly down, then put on the exhausted shuffle of someone who did manual labour from dayclean to daylean. She went round the front and limped into the rum shop. A few people glanced up but went right back to their drinking.
Tan-Tan stood for a second, blinking in the flickering lamplight. The woman who’d taken a piss out back was laughing and talking at a table with three other women. One of them had the Toussaint-style clothes and the lost, frightened look of the newly headblind; a recent exile. Singletons or with their compères, people were taking their rough ease from the day’s labour. Wisdom weed smoke choked the air.
The owner was at the bar now, wiping out some ashtrays. Tan-Tan shuffled over. The owner frowned at the dirty, downpressed woman in front of him. “Compère,” Tan-Tan asked in a trembly voice, “beg you little liqueur, nuh?”
“You mad or what?” the man growled. “It ain’t have nothing for free in here.”