Emma Bull - Bone Dance

Sherrea looked up, but it was a blind look. “The air’s not moving around you,” she said, “but there’s a wind that’s trying to blow. Somebody’s gotta pull the windbreak down.” Her voice was changing. Now she wasn’t looking at me at all; she was looking at the tops of her eye sockets. All I could see were the whites. I rocked slowly back from the cabinet.

“Sit still, munequita ,” said the new voice. It was lower than Sher’s, and thick with an accent that ought to have been Hispanic and wasn’t. Sherrea’s lips, making the words, moved differently than they usually did. Her face looked suddenly much older. “You afraid of me?”

Munequita meant—I felt the infinitesimal shift of new knowledge. Little doll. I shivered. “I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, at least. Who are you?”

A hooting laugh. “Nobody you know. Listen now. It’s time you was doin’ what you supposed to. You got work to do, and all you do is look out for your own self. You not ready to do your work. That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you.”

“Nobody’s bound to me,” I said firmly.

“You think that? Where you been, sittin’ in a hole? You wait ‘til le Chasseur comes. But you dangle those lives over the fire and that’s all for you. I give you warning.”

Sherrea’s lips had drawn back from her nicotine-stained teeth in a big nasty smile. I stood up carefully. “Well, thank you. I’ll be going, then.”

“Sit down.” I can’t describe that voice. I sat down. “But you can save your ass. You gotta learn to serve, and let your own self be fed by the spirits. Serve the loa, serve all the people, and go hungry and cold yourself. Then all the parts of you gonna come together and make you well. But strong people want to keep chained what you gotta make free. There’s gonna be blood, and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. But if you give what I tol’ you, the light of change’ll shine in the tower of shadows.” I felt like someone who’s gone to get a wart removed, and been told he needs radiation and chemo. I am not good at hungry and cold. “So what is it that I have to do?” I said.

“Donkey. Are you a little baby that I have to tell you right from wrong? You feel every day what you have to do, and you make like you don’t. But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords.”

“All I want is to quit doing downtime.”

Whatever was using Sherrea’s mouth hooted. “My brother already said he’d help with that. You know my brother? Uncle Death?”

I clutched at my knees. “What am I trying to accomplish, at least?”

“To open the way, little donkey!”

“What’re you frowning about?” Sherrea grumbled, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was back. Her eyes were where they ought to be, her face was her own.

“Is this your way of teaching me that I get what I pay for?”

“You don’t like the way I read, don’t ask me to do it.”

“I don’t mind your reading. It’s your little friends coming to visit that gives me a sharp pain.” She was sullen. “So you got a visit from Tia Luisa, huh? Better clean up your act, then. That’s for when the querent is in shit up to the chin.”

She put out a hand to sweep up the cards. I put two fingers on hers, lightly, and let go. “Sher. I’m sorry. But four times, it’s happened. I get some kind of physical trauma, not even enough to knock me out, and zip—I wake up someplace else, with the closing credits rolling, and I can’t remember the rest of the movie. Something in my head is broken.”

“Most people’s heads are broken, Sparrow. So what?”

“So I need help. And I’m scared.” That last escaped before I got my mouth closed.

She scratched her lower lip with her fingernail, watching me. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll try a clarification.”

She picked up the cards, all except Joan of Arc, and shuffled them. “Cut,” she told me, and I did. She picked up the piles and began to flick down cards. And slowed, and stopped, finally, with the fourth card, the grinning figure with the fan of swords over his shoulder. The third card had been the black juggler. The second had been the man with the sun. The first, Baron Samedi. Sherrea’s hand hovered over the deck, not quite touching the next card. Then she pulled it, quickly, and slapped it down. The red-and-white lovers. She raised her eyes to my face. “Don’t fuck with me,” she said.

“Funny. I was going to say that to you.” And I really was. I was angry. My vulnerability had slipped out into her hands, and she was playing me with it. I’ve seen card tricks; the randomness of a shuffled deck is an overrated quantity. But Sherrea’s eyes were a little wild, and her hands were graceless and uncertain. In a haphazard flurry, she laid the rest of the pattern. All the same.

We sat in the dim room, staring at the ugly pictures. I was holding as still as I could, so that none of them would do their foolish dance of transformation. But my nose itched, and it made Baron Samedi laugh.

“I guess you better do whatever it was I told you to do,” Sher said at last, and began picking up the cards, slowly, all her facility with them disappeared.

“You mean, nothing concrete?”

She shook her head. “If you can’t act the way the cards tell you, then react that way. Make your decisions when it’s time.”

She lifted the last card, Saint Joan. Under it, at the precise center of the white silk scarf, was a spot of fresh, vivid red.

“Do what you were told to do.” Sherrea’s voice was thin. “And don’t come back here until you’re sure you’re doing it.” She lifted her face, hard as a marble goddess’s. “The next move is yours.”

I found my shirt and pants in her kitchen, stiff from the clothesline. On top of them was a thin leather cord with a little pendant made out of dark wood: two V shapes, overlapping point to point. I locked myself in the bathroom again and dressed, and after a moment shrugged and dropped the thong around my neck and under my shirt. The pendant felt just like wood.

When I left, Sherrea was still sitting in the living room, in front of the blood-marred white scarf.

Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that’s out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don’t have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.

The beauty of the Night Fair was that no matter how one defined happiness at a given moment, it was usually available there. The price was negotiable, within limits. That’s why the Night Fair endured: because we never stop needing something to make us happy.

The sun had set in a smear of indigo and orange when I reached that chainlink border. I twined my fingers in the fabric of the fence and felt bits of rust grind away under my grip. I was in my own country again. Here there were no gods but the Deal, no spooks but those that could be conjured for money at the buyer’s request. I was safe from Sherrea’s riding spirits, if not my own.