Warren Murphy: Voodoo Die

Corazon stepped from the car and looked at the oily pool.

"If nature had give us oil instead of tar, we would be wealthy men. A wealthy country," he said.

Estrada nodded.

"Still, tar is all right," Corazon said. He plunked a pebble onto the lake of pitch. It sat atop the shimmery surface, floating there. "Tar all right. None of us starve," the Generalissimo said.

He looked to the two soldiers in the front seat. "Come on along with that machine," he said. "And be careful. We gonna use it soon."

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He laughed a rich big belly laugh as he walked off, the three soldiers following him onto a small path that skirted the tar pit and led to the walk up the mountainside.

The four men were just skirting the pitch lake when Ruby Gonzalez' jeep pulled up behind the limousine. She saw them walking away, the two soldiers lugging the heavy mung machine, and she could see their destination was the small cluster of huts at the top of the hill. The sounds of drums resonated in the air, gently, as if from far away.

Ruby backed up her jeep and drove it into thick brush where it could not be seen from the road.

She got out of the vehicle and looked up at the broad back of Corazon, slowly moving up the mountain. He was followed by Estrada and the two soldiers carrying the machine. As she looked the sun moved from behind a cloud and shone down brightly on the black lake of pitch, and at that moment Corazon, Estrada, the two soldiers, the entire mountain seemed to shift in Ruby's vision, as if it had all moved twenty yards to the left. She blinked her eyes, not believing what she saw. She opened them again. The images she was watching were still displaced.

She realized she was seeing a mirage. The bright sun was shimmering on the rain water on the surface of the tar pit and the vapors acted like a giant prism, moving images from where they should be.

She filed the phenomenon away as incidental information, then pushed her way through the brush and overgrowth and around the left side of the tar pit and began to clamber up the hill.

Her direct path was rougher, but would get her to the village before Corazon and his men.

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As she neared the crest of the small mountain and the grass huts there, the sound of the drums grew louder.

There were a half-dozen huts, built in a semicircle around a pit in which logs burned, despite the blistering heat of the Baqian summer. The drums which Ruby thought might come from the village were still sounding, from even farther away.

There was a sweet flower smell in the air, the scent of cheap after-shave.

As Ruby pushed onto the crest of the hill, she felt a strong pair of arms encircle her from behind. She looked down. They were bare black arms, a man's.

"I want to talk to the old man," she said in island Spanish. "Hurry, fool."

"Who are you?" a voice asked. It was a voice that sounded as if it had been rebounding around the walls of a tunnel for six weeks before reaching someone's ears.

"Some people are coming here to kill him and you, fool, stand here with your arms caressing my breasts. Quickly. Take me to him. Or are you afraid of a woman who carries no weapons?"

Another voice bit the air.

"A woman without weapons would be a strange woman indeed." She looked across the clearing. A small, wizened man with skin the color of roasted chestnuts was walking toward her. He wore black cotton trousers with ragged bottoms and no shirt. Ruby guessed his age at seventy.

He nodded as he reached them and the arms came loose from around Ruby. She bowed to the man and kissed his hand. She knew nothing of voodoo, but marks of courtesy were marks of courtesy everyplace.

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"Now what is this about someone coming to kill me?" the man asked. Behind him, Ruby saw people peering from behind the grass huts.

"Corazon and his men. They are on the hillside now. He wants to kill you because he fears you threaten his rule."

Without taking his eyes from Ruby's, the old man snapped his fingers. Behind him a young woman ran from behind one of the huts over to the edge of the clearing, looking down on the path below.

She scurried back to the old man.

"They come, master. Four of them. They carry a box."

"Corazon's new weapon," said Ruby. "It kills."

"I have heard of this new weapon," the old man said. He looked at the man behind Ruby and nodded. "All right, Edved. You know what to do."

The man brushed by Ruby and walked away. She saw he was a giant of a black man, almost seven feet tall, skin glistening plum-colored in the hot afternoon sun.

"My son," the old man said.

"Most impressive," Ruby said.

The old man took her elbow and led her to the other side of the small plateau.

"I guess it would not be good for the Generalissimo to find you here?" he said.

"No, it wouldn't."

"An American?" he asked as he led Ruby down the hillside, away from Corazon's men.

Yes.

"I thought so. But you speak the island language well. And your costume would fool almost anyone." Forty feet down the hillside, the old man stopped

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on a flat outcropping of rock. He pushed aside heavy brush and vines that grew from a tree and Ruby saw the opening to a cave. The cool air from inside felt like full-blast air conditioning.

"Come. We will be safe here and we can talk," he said.

He led her inside and as the vines closed, they muffled the sound of the distant drums, beating their insistent forty beats a minute, and she realized that she had become so accustomed to their sound that she no longer heard them.

The old man squatted on the ground in the dark cave, managing somehow to look regal in that inelegant posture.

"My name is Samedi," he said.

The name hit Ruby like a sudden attack of migraine.

She was five years old again and visiting her grandmother in Alabama. And one evening she wandered away from the shabby little house near the fly-buzzing pond and down the road and found herself outside a cemetery.

Night was falling fast, but she saw people inside the cemetery and she leaned on the stone wall to watch, because they were dancing and they seemed to be having a good time. Ruby started dancing, too, where she was standing, wishing she was grown so she could go over and dance with the big people. And then their dance stopped and a man with no shirt but wearing an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat came out of the far darkness, and the dancers fell to the ground and began to chant.

It was hard for Ruby to make out what they were saying because she had never heard the word before,

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but she listened carefully, and she recognized it. They were saying:

"Samedi. Samedi. Samedi."

Suddenly, Ruby didn't feel like dancing anymore. A chill swept her body, a sense of nameless fear, and she remembered she was five years old and this was a graveyard and it was night and she was far from home, and she bolted and ran back to her grandmother.

The old woman comforted the frightened child in her big warm arms.

"What happened, child?" she asked. "What give you this fright?"

"What is Samedi, Granna?"

She felt the old woman stiffen.

"You was down de cemetery?" the old woman said.

Ruby nodded.

"Some things child just don' gotta know about, 'cep-pin' you stays 'way from de graveyard at night," her grandmother said.

She squeezed Ruby hard to her, as if to accentuate her order, and Ruby stayed there, feeling warm and loved and protected, but still wondering, and later when her grandmother tucked her into bed, she asked again.

"Granna, please tell me, what is Samedi?"

"All right, chile, 'cause I get no rest iffen I don' answer you. Samedi be the leader of them people you saw dancin' down there."

"Then why was I ascared?"

"Because those people not like us. Not like you and me."