Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem Read Online Free PDF Page B

fire ant mounds.
    That’s where Abraham Swallow came into the picture.
    He lived in a puce-colored cement-block bungalow in a back corner of the cemetery beneath the electric-orange blooms of a Royal Poinciana. Since it was after one p.m., he’d already sucked down a couple of Belikin lagers with his rice and beans and fried plantains, and was thinking about a nap.
    That was when I drove the SUV up the red-dirt road that meandered through the gaudy mausoleums and rococo tombs housing more than two centuries of the dead. With the recent summer rains, it was like driving with square tires on a carrot grater.
    Swallow, sitting on the edge of the front stoop, watched my approach with wide-eyed dismay. I could have been the messiah or the devil’s altar girl. In either case, I was trouble.
    “Hey, Swallow,” I said.
    “Ain’t seen you, cousin, since Uncle Luther died.”
    He stood up and scratched the back of his neck. He was decked out in a shapeless olive-drab T-shirt and the gray striped pants from an old suit.
    “Bin a while,” I said.
    We drifted into the local patois . He asked after my mother, who’d been dead for the past seven years. As I stepped out of the Shogun, I pulled a pint of 1 Barrel from a plastic sack. A cheap trick.
    We passed the bottle back and forth once or twice. Swallow excused himself and went in the house. He returned with a port-soaked cigarillo. I watched him make a scalpel-straight incision with his fingernail down one side, dump out the tobacco and roll a fat custom blunt from a scraggly handful of local herb. He lit it and took a deep toke.
    “What chew want?”
    “I need a new identity for the truck and a place to crash.”
    “I don’ know, cousin. I’m not much for the heat.”
    He passed the blunt. I took some and held my nose. The acrid blue smoke burst out of my lungs. After the second puff, I began to mellow out.
    “What’s not to know? I need a place for tonight, a little time to clear my head. Then I’m outa here.”
    “You sure?”
    “Just one night. Least you can do for family.”
    This last appeal put me over the top. We hid the Mitsubishi in an empty mausoleum. Then Swallow made me a plate of rice and beans doused with Marie Sharp’s pepper sauce. We finished the pint of 1 Barrel and talked some more about family.
    I asked Swallow if he knew where I could get some .45 shells.
    “Might be I could help you out,” he said. “Cost you two hundred dollars for a box.”
    All I had was a fifty, folded up in a gold locket dangling between my breasts. The locket also contained a tiny oval photograph of Tony.
    Okay. Okay. So we’d been intimate for about six months.
    I hated sleeping by myself. Scary dreams. Monsters under the bed. All that shit.
    But that didn’t make me a murderer. Or did it? Did a brown recluse kill her mate?
    Swallow showed me a cot in a little room off the kitchen. He gave me a towel and a bar of soap. The shower was on an open cement pad out behind the house.
    I knew he was watching while I soaped up, then let the water wash over me like a drug. After I came back to life, I hand-washed my clothes.
    The rest of the afternoon I sat around naked, making lists. Seven capitals starting with the letter B. The last seven books I’d read. My last seven orgasms.
    Swallow spent most of the afternoon changing the color of the Mitsubishi from silver gray to navy. It also got new plates and a cracked windshield. I gave Swallow the fifty bucks for the redo.
    Dinner was canned tomato soup and some old fry jacks. I went to bed at dusk, still naked under a wonderful cotton sheet so old and soft it was like my own skin.
    Tony kept getting in the way of sleep. He wasn’t a half bad guy when he took his mind off his rackets. He liked to fish for amber jack and mackerel along the smaller cayes. Sometimes we’d tuck up on a moonlit sandy beach with a bottle of hooch, Tony playing old Bob Marley songs on a sway-backed guitar. Then fuck till dawn. Now all that seemed a