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

as well. There were hints of camphor, roses, pepper, wine, Thai lemongrass, and wintergreen, and then he saw the stall: “Crossroads Spiritual Supply and Curio.” On the back wall, on shelves of cinder block and pine, were stoppered vials of many shapes and sizes. In different-colored oils—golds, merlots, muddy browns, and fiery orange like Tabasco—were various grasses, seeds, and roots, some of which resembled human body parts.

Shanté started lowering the hatch.

“This is your place?”

She nodded. “I’m going to take you to the house, and then I have to get right back.”

“So what is all this stuff—vodou supplies?”

“It has nothing to do with vodou.”

Ran waited, but clearly he was going to have to ask. “So what is it?”

“It’s hoodoo, for the most part.”

He blinked. “So, hoodoo and vodou—these are different?”

“Very.” Terse and in no mood to educate her former flame, she conducted him ever deeper into the village, between the canted walls of compounds where Ran heard radios tuned to NPR—the BBC World News. There were TVs blaring, mothers scolding kids. In a sun-baked square, boys were playing stickball. They passed an open gate, where a handsome twenty-something man in a white wrap with blue birds on the wing was speaking on a cell. Behind him in the yard, his wife (Ran assumed she was his wife) was hanging batiked cloth on a line as the wind bloused into it. Laughing at something in his conversation, he caught Ran’s gaze and smiled with twinkling, good-natured eyes before he softly closed the gate, and Ran walked on, feeling touched by grace.

Shanté’s house was cinder block with a tin roof and a swept dirt yard dominated by an enormous tree with a broad, flat crown and a buttressed trunk.

Inside, her clean, spare room smelled like her shop. One whole side was dominated by a plywood worktable, where she clearly made her preparations. There was a bed, a dorm-sized fridge, a bookshelf, a stove, a dining table, and two chairs. There was a small shrine, too, with several stemmed glasses filled with water, a crucifix, a bowl of white carnations, a King James Bible opened to the Psalms. There were numerous photos there, including one of Delores, before which a votive burned.

“All right, listen,” she said, in a martial tone that Ran, despite his problem with authority, really didn’t mind. “Let’s get that cut cleaned up, and then I have to go. This is one of the biggest days in my whole year.” She handed him a phone. “Call your wife.”

Ran took the receiver dutifully, then stood, paralyzed. “I don’t think I can talk to Claire right now.”

She regarded him, arms akimbo. “Why not?”

“We’re sort of going through a patch, Shanté.”

“A patch…What kind of patch? A bad patch? A briar patch? What?”

He shrugged and looked away. “Could you just do me a favor and let her know?”

“What’s going on here, Ran?”

“I’d tell you if I knew.”

“Why don’t you know?” she persevered. “If you don’t know, who knows?”

“Look, don’t give me the third degree,” he said, “okay? What did Claire tell you anyway?”

“Where do I start?” She shoved a chair at him and fetched some swabs and alcohol. “That you’re manic…” A trifle brusque, she started to debride the cut. “That you’re off your meds. That yesterday you kidnapped your children, assaulted a stranger in Charleston on the street, and now you’re on the run from the police. What else? No, that was pretty much the gist. Of course, she didn’t know about your wreck.”

“Tune in to America’s Most Wanted,” Ransom said. “They’re featuring me this week.”

She pulled away to look. “You think this is funny?”

“No,” he said, “but it’s a little funny, though. I mean, come on, Shan, there’s a fair amount of spin on all of that.”

“I’ve known Claire a long time, Ransom,” she replied. “I’m pretty good at compensating for her spin.”

“Look,” he said, “I admit I let my medication slide a bit, but I took it yesterday. I’m getting back on track, and it isn’t like I’m crazy….” He floated this, but she just frowned and let him stew. “I don’t seem crazy, do I?”

“I’m making up my mind.”

Ransom was the first to blink. “Damn, you remind me of your mom!”

“Say it one more time, you’re going to get one in the arm.”

“A noogie?” Ransom asked. “Look, you almost smiled—I saw that!”

“Here.” She handed him the swab.

“So, enough about me,” he said. “Cell said there was some guy?” He glanced toward the bed—single, tightly made as though for camp.

“Simon. That’s been over for two years. We split up when I left Zaire.”

“You were in Zaire?”

“For four and a half years.”

She kept her eyes fixed on his forehead, and Ransom felt the distance loom. “I guess I haven’t been too great at keeping in touch.”

Acknowledging the understatement, she let her gaze drop to his face.

“What were you doing over there?”

“I was in a kinkimba.”

“What’s that?”

“A school where they teach kinganga.”

“What’s kinganga?”

“A science.”

“What kind of science?”

“The science of how to be a human being,” she replied, “how to live a human life.”

Ransom blinked. “Damn, I could use a course in that! So you studied for the priesthood?”

“Actually, I was a cook. That’s the only way they let a woman in. Eventually, I learned the traditional practice.”

“Meaning, vodou…excuse me! Hoodoo?”

“No. Hoodoo is what traditional Congo practice turned into in the U.S., when slaves brought it here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was called Conjure then. Vodou is something else—not Congo, Ran, but Fon, okay?”

“What’s Fon?”

“The Fon,” she said, with modest heat, “are a tribe from West Africa. They went to Haiti and developed vodou, or vodun. Santeria or Ocha is from the Yoruba, another tribe from a different part of West Africa. Olokun—the one you asked about outside?—he’s the Yoruba god of the sea. Most of the people in Alafia follow Yoruba traditions. Me, I’m Congo.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because when I went over there with Simon, in the little villages near Tsheila and Isangila, among his people, the BaManianga, half the people on the