Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

bend, and at that very moment, from the opposite direction, an old-style VW van came barreling toward him, its toylike engine whining like something that derived its motive power from tightened rubber bands.

It stopped beside him. The driver, a woman, stared out and blinked. Ran blinked, staring in.

At first take, Ran’s surmise that he was dead was further reinforced. The driver was Delores Mills, or rather, her unaged body double and dead ringer in a bitambala headscarf, black with a large gold sunflower, and dangle earrings.

“Shanté?” he said, taking a gander.

“Ransom?”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for you,” she answered. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for you.”

“What the hell happened to you?”

He touched his cheek. “This? Had a little crash. Fell asleep at the wheel…Story of my life.”

“Are you all right?”

He shrugged. “Either fine or dead—haven’t reached a verdict yet.” He grinned, but she, looking more than ever like her mom, was in no mood for comedy. “Why were you looking for me anyway?” he asked.

“Because your wife called here, frantic, at midnight and said you’d disappeared and they couldn’t think where else you might be. Why are you here?”

Ran blinked. “Now that you mention it, I have no freaking clue. I was driving. I saw the sign for Beaufort. I remembered Cell saying you lived nearby. A little birdie whispered: ‘Go see Shanté.’”

“A little birdie…”

“Well, I don’t mean a literal bird, of course.”

“What do you mean?” Shanté was clearly in a literal mood.

“I mean, something said go pay you a visit, and here I am. Don’t look at me like I have the lampshade on my head. Don’t you ever have impulses and give in to them?”

Giving him a severely doubtful look over glasses that were themselves severe—small, square, and hip, with inner rims of limpid gold—she nodded to the shotgun seat and said, “Get in.”

With this terse remark, she executed a three-point reverse, and her wrap—in the same pattern as her headscarf—slipped, showing the black Lycra rim of biking shorts that hugged unfashionably stout but sturdy thighs that flexed impressively as she pressed the clutch with one bare, dusty foot, and, with the other foot, the gas. Her toenails, Ransom noted, were painted a pale shade of pink.

“Damn, Shan,” he said. “It’s great to see you. You look good. I swear to God, though, when you pulled up—and don’t take this wrong, I mean it as a compliment—I thought you were your mom.”

“How else would I take it, Ran? I say hello to her in the mirror every morning when I wake up. I’m no spring chicken anymore. Neither are you.”

He gave her the opportunity, but she didn’t bite. “I look okay, though, right?”

“Actually, you look like shit…. Hammered dogshit in the vague shape of a man.”

He shook his head and grinned. “You haven’t lost those winning ways…. So what exactly did Claire tell you?”

“An earful. None good.”

“Oh.” Fleeting contact with reality put a minor crimp in Ransom’s mood, and he sat back like the reprimanded student on the corner stool.

The village, from without, resembled a frontier fort, walled with sharpened palings sheathed in bark. Over the gate, a banner proclaimed, “Harvest Festival Today, Visitors Welcome.” Shanté parked in a dusty lot where pickup trucks and farm machines sat cheek by jowl with Mercedeses and Lexuses with license plates from Cobb and DeKalb counties, Georgia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

“So what exactly are you harvesting?” Ran asked.

“Ground nuts.” Shanté nodded to a field they passed as they walked in.

Ran squinted at the knee-high foliage. “Soybeans?”

“Peanuts.”

“A goober fest!”

She smiled with narrowed eyes. “You showed up right on time. Wait here.”

Crossing the courtyard to confer with several colleagues, she left him by the gate. In the shade of a thatch-roofed building, men were drumming, while others danced—a few. More watched or simply milled, ducking into dimly lit temples, where candlelight flickered on lavish altars where gifts of fruit and flowers had been placed. Presiding over one was an iconic man of sculpted ebony, brandishing a two-sided ax; in another, a bare-breasted black Madonna, holding in one hand a dove, in the other, a human heart. Towering above a concrete basin the size of a home swimming pool, though just six inches deep, was a dark-faced Neptune with a trident and a crown. Dripping down his washboard superhero torso, the water, cycling back, set the scales agleam on his blue-green merman tail. He might have been transported from a miniature golf pavilion in Myrtle Beach, thought Ran, wondering where the hell he was, and liking it.

“Who’s King Neptune?” he asked Shanté when she returned.

“His name is Olokun. Come on.”

In the crowd, as they passed through, Ran saw the occasional fela or dashiki. Many more, though, looked like moms and dads out for a Sunday stroll in chinos and Lands End sweater sets. Ran’s was not by any means the sole white face. A rangy kid slouched by with matted dreads stuffed into a tricolored Rasta hat, and there—conferring, bleary-eyed, over a map—were the inevitable Scandinavian students with backpacks, leather clogs, and mussy, slept-on white blond hair.

A relaxed and festive atmosphere prevailed. There were people eating Ethiopian bread and Southern barbecue, salt peanuts in the shell. The scene, Ran thought, was like a street fair, the San Gennaro in New York, or some blue September Sunday in Montmartre, toiling up the hill behind the crowds to Sacré Coeur. It was, in a way, unlike any place he’d ever been, and in another, pretty much like anywhere.

Shanté led him off the beaten path and down a narrow street of shops, all of identical Third World shotgun-shack construction, dirt-floored, with whitewashed plywood hatches propped open to provide awnings over narrow countertops where there was business being done. The necessities were in evidence: cooking oil and kerosene in reused plastic jugs, shrimp and fish on beds of ice, fresh produce and eggs—not just white and brown, but speckled ones and pale blue, too, from Araucana hens—in recycled cardboard crates.

Ran caught a complex smell, sweet like perfume, with astringent notes