“You didn’t have to do that either,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
Mrs. Dunwiddy came into the room. She was holding a small brown glass bottle triumphantly. “Smelling salts,” she announced. “I know I got some somewhere. I buy these in, oh, sixty-seven, sixty-eight. I don’t know if they still any good.” She peered at Fat Charlie, then scowled. “He wake up. Who did wake him up?”
“He wasn’t breathing,” said Mrs. Bustamonte. “So I give him a slap.”
“And I pour water on him,” said Miss Noles, “which help bring him around the rest of the way.”
“I don’t need smelling salts,” said Fat Charlie. “I’m already wet and in pain.” But, with elderly hands, Mrs. Dunwiddy had removed the cap from the bottle, and she was pushing it under his nose. He breathed in as he moved back, and inhaled a wave of ammonia. His eyes watered, and he felt as if he had been punched in the nose. Water dripped down his face.
“There,” said Mrs. Dunwiddy. “Feeling better now?”
“What time is it?” asked Fat Charlie.
“It’s almost five in the morning,” said Mrs. Higgler. She took a swig of coffee from her gigantic mug. “We all worried about you. You better tell us what happened.”
Fat Charlie tried to remember. It was not that it had evaporated, as dreams do, more as if the experience of the last few hours had happened to somebody else, someone who was not him, and he had to contact that person by some hitherto unpracticed form of telepathy. It was all a jumble in his mind, the technicolor Ozness of the other place dissolving back into the sepia tones of reality. “There were caves. I asked for help. There were lots of animals there. Animals who were people. None of them wanted to help. They were all scared of my daddy. Then one of them said she would help me.”
“She?” said Mrs. Bustamonte.
“Some of them were men, and some of them were women,” said Fat Charlie. “This one was a woman.”
“Do you know what she was? Crocodile? Hyena? Mouse?”
He shrugged. “I might have remembered before people started hitting me and pouring water on me. And putting things in my nose. It drives stuff out of your head.”
Mrs. Dunwiddy said, “Do you remember what I tell you? Not giving anything away? Only trade?”
“Yes,” he said, vaguely proud of himself. “Yes. There was a monkey who wanted me to give him things, and I said no. Look, I think I need a drink.”
Mrs. Bustamonte took a glass of something from the table. “We thought maybe you need a drink. So we put the sherry through the strainer. There may be a few mixed herbs in there, but nothin‘ big.”
His hands were fists in his lap. He opened his right hand to take the glass from the old woman. Then he stopped, and he stared.
“What?” asked Mrs. Dunwiddy. “What is it?”
In the palm of his hand, black and crushed out of shape, and wet with sweat, Fat Charlie was holding a feather. He remembered, then. He remembered all of it.
“It was the Bird Woman,” he said.
GRAY DAWN WAS BREAKING AS FAT CHARLIE CLIMBED INTO the passenger seat of Mrs. Higgler’s station wagon.
“You sleepy?” she asked him.
“Not really. I just feel weird.”
“Where do you want me to take you? My place? Your dad’s house? A motel?”
“I don’t know.”
She put the car into gear and lurched out into the road.
“Where are we going?”
She did not answer. She slurped some coffee from her megamug. Then she said, “Maybe what we do tonight is for the best and maybe it ain’t. Sometimes family things, they best left for families to fix. You and your brother. You’re too similar. I guess that is why you fight.”
“I take it this is some obscure West Indian usage of the word ‘similar’ which means ‘nothing at all alike’?”
“Don’t you start going all British on me. I know what I’m sayin‘. You and him, you both cut from the same cloth. I remember your father sayin’ to me, Callyanne, my boys, they stupider than—you know, it don’t matter what he actually said, but the point is, he said it about both of you.” A thought struck her. “Hey. When you go to the place where the old gods are, you see your father in that place?”
“I don’t think so. I’d remember.”
She nodded, and said nothing as she drove.
She parked the car, and they got out.
It was chilly in the Florida dawn. The Garden of Rest looked like something from a movie: there was a low ground mist which threw everything into soft focus. Mrs. Higgler opened the small gate, and they walked through the cemetery.
Where there had been only fresh earth filling his father’s grave, now there was turf, and at the head of the grave was a metal plaque with a metal vase built into it, and in the vase a single yellow silk rose.
“Lord have mercy on the sinner in this grave,” said Mrs Higgler, with feeling. “Amen, amen, amen.”