Anger filled up her mind, buzzing in her head like bees. She picked up the machète again and started to chop, chop, chop like if she could chop down every tree on this motherass planet. Abitefa found her a little later, blowing hard, her sweat-soaked clothes sticking to her like sensé fowl feathers when it rain, but still chopping strong. And cursing! If curse word was machète, Tan-Tan would have chopped down that whole bush by herself with her mouth alone. She glared down Abitefa, but what tallpeople body talk mean to a douen? Damn mangy not-yet-hinte didn’t see the warning in her look. With one claw foot Abitefa calmly took the machète from Tan-Tan’s hand. *You tired. Rest.*
Tan-Tan felt her mouth start to tremble. She sucked in breath after breath, trying to catch more air. The breaths turned to sobs.
“He rape me, Abitefa. He put this baby in me, like the one before. He was forever trying to plant me, like I was his soil to harvest.”
Abitefa scratched her two feet-them a little on the ground. *Why?*
“How the rass I am to know? Eh? Tell me how! I only wish I could have stop he—kick he with my claw foot-them, jook out he eye-them with my pointy beak!”
*You not a hinte,* Abitefa pointed out.
The sobs erupted, harsh as coughs. “Not a hinte, not nothing with value. Better I did dead, oui.”
Abitefa folded up her backwards knees to plump herself down on the ground beside Tan-Tan. She rocked from side to side, making a humming sound in the back of her throat. Thinking.
The baby was jooking into Tan-Tan’s side. She put a hand to the place. The baby moved away from it. It really had a living being inside her for true.
Abitefa cocked her head to look at Tan-Tan. *No need to wish for dead, it will happen soon enough. It does come to all of we.*
Tefa just couldn’t understand, oui. “Is all right, Abitefa.”
That had been a good lime, a nice piece of entertainment. That poor, tired woman sleeping like the dead in her break-down little hut was going to be so surprised to wake up and find a big pot of curry goat on her kitchen table. Tan-Tan wondered if the people at the cookstand had missed it yet.
It was early evening. Lights were being lit all over Chigger Bite. Maybe she would go back early up the daddy tree tonight.
She was nearly to the outskirts of the town when she heard a noise from a side street: Putt-putt-putt. It sounded familiar, and it was coming closer. Frowning, Tan-Tan waited to see what it was.
Ahead of her, a car turned from the side street onto the one she was standing on. A car! Big and loud and smelly; body made of rusting sheets of iron held together with rivets; and large, lumpy wheels made from tree sap or something. The car’s exhaust pipe was pumping out one set of black smoke, clouds of it rolling up into the clean air. The exhaust is where the explosions were coming from. And look, is bad-minded Gladys she behind the wheel, oui.
At first Tan-Tan didn’t even self have the presence of mind to be frightened. So is that Gladys and Michael was making in them iron shop. Michael was beside Gladys, fanning away smoke from her face with a palm leaf fan.
And in the back of the car, sitting high on the caboose? Tan-Tan’s stepmother, Janisette.
“Look she there!” Janisette shouted. Gladys turned the car towards Tan-Tan. Janisette aimed a rifle at her stepdaughter. Tan-Tan jumped behind the corner of a house. Pow! A spray of plaster flew into Tan-Tan’s eyes from the bullet that hit the wall right beside her head.
Phut-phut-phut. Tan-Tan ran, dipping through people’s kitchen gardens, ducking behind chicken coops and thing. The baby bounced like a watermelon in her belly, slowing her down, like it wanted her to get caught. Antonio’s duppy self, haunting and hunting her from within. Tan-Tan put two fists to her belly bottom to hold it still. She ran, she ran, she ran. “Nanny, Granny Nanny, help me now…” She was only sucking in air, but she couldn’t get enough. The autocarriage stalked her, phut-phut-phut. She crashed through somebody’s bambam pumpkin patch. Her foot smashed clomp! right through a ripe pumpkin. She had to stop and shake it off. Through frightened tears she saw a face in the kitchen window, smiling a vampirish soucouyant smile in the guttering candlelight: Al’s mother. She nodded a greeting in the direction of the autocar.
Phut-phut-phut.
Tan-Tan ran.
The car was getting tangled in the ropy pumpkin vines, it didn’t have enough power to tear free. Janisette pulled off another shot, missed. Fire burning in her throat, Tan-Tan headed for the cornfields. She could hear the whine of the carriage straining against the bonds that held it, the coughing of the engine as the wheels spun pumpkin trash up into it. She lost them in the tall corn, escaped into the bush and ran, ran, ran till every breath was like sucking in ground glass and her limbs were whip-striped from branches she had fled past. She collapsed to the ground, chest heaving for air. How, how? Too frightened for words, she couldn’t complete the thought. Were they still following? She tried to still her breath, listened hard. No car sound. On foot, maybe? Sneaking up on her right this minute? Tan-Tan peered back the way she thought she’d come. Outside the bush the sky would be still deepening to oxblood dark, but here in the bush night had already come, solid as a lump of coal. She couldn’t see a rass. Cooling sweat made her shiver. A grit fly nibbled painfully at her eye corner, but she didn’t dare slap it away. Was that a light? The sound of a footstep? No. She waited minutes more. No, they weren’t coming after her.
Where was she? She hadn’t entered the bush at her usual spot, hadn’t had been able to spare a moment to even think about her lantern, much less collect it from where she’d hidden it.
The grit flies were gathering, drawn by her heat. She could hear their whining. She was bitten, then again. Dashing furious fingers at her eyes, she fumbled with her other hand in her carry pouch, found the precious matches. It felt like a stinging age of stumbling round in the dark before she put hands on a likely brand of wood. When she moved it she disturbed a ground puppy, which took a good bite out of her arm before it bounced off into the night. Damned things glowed purple in the dark.
By now the grit flies were worrying so badly at her eyes that she could barely stand to take her hands away to light the brand. It took a long time to catch, nine or ten tries with the matches. By the time it was burning well, her eyes were swollen nearly shut.
The brand flared, driving away the grit flies. Blessèd, blessèd relief. She heard a sound moving away from her, away from the light; a massive crushing of the undergrowth. Then another. Mako jumbie? Rolling calf? She began to tremble.
It was hours before she came upon the douen path. She could have wept with relief, but she didn’t dare; she was hardly seeing out of her tortured eyes any more. She careened along the path. When her shins finally crashed into a buttress root of the daddy tree, she thought it was the sweetest pain she’d ever felt. She extinguished the burning branch by stabbing it into the damp loam and, eyes shut, scrambled exhaustedly up until the first douen lights flickered against her eyelashes. She was home. She climbed to Chichibud and Benta’s nest. Chichibud was up, waiting for her. “I thought is you that I could hear crashing through the leaves,” he said. “Why you let grit fly do you so? What happen to your lantern?”