Mr. Clarinet

As Dreadlocks drew closer, Max motioned to Chantale to go back to the rocks. He was near the bank now. Max thought of pulling his gun on him and getting him to stop, but if the guy was a nutcase that wouldn't do anything. Some people just wanted you to shoot them because they didn't have the guts to put themselves out of their misery.

Dreadlocks slowed down and stopped right opposite Max, up to his ankles in water. He held out what he had in his hands—a battered, rusted tin box with some of its original design—a large, blue rose—clinging to it.

Max was about to walk toward him when a large rock flew out and hit Dreadlocks on the side of the head.

"Iwa! Iwa!"

Children's frightened yells, right behind Max.

Suddenly Dreadlocks was hit from all sides by a crossfire of rocks and large stones, thrown with surprising accuracy, all striking some part of his body.

Max ducked and moved back up the bank, where the stone throwers were gathered—a small group of children, the eldest being maybe twelve.

"Iwa! Iwa!"

This emboldened the worshippers who, up until that moment, had stood stock-still, watching. They began to pelt Dreadlocks with stones, but they didn't have the children's accuracy and their shots went wide, hitting the frozen human crosses and sending them toppling into the water, or striking the possessed and either completely exorcising them or driving them into even more demonic spasms.

Then Dreadlocks's hands took a direct hit. He dropped the box, which fell into the stream, disappeared below the surface, and then bobbed back up a few feet away.

Dreadlocks went after it, running as fast as he could, pushing through the water, pursued by volleys of stones and a few of the bolder pilgrims who, thinking he was fleeing them, made after him with sticks, but were in no hurry to catch up with him.

Dreadlocks vanished down the stream.

When it was clear he wasn't coming back, natural order returned to Saut d'Eau. The spirits repossessed the bodies they'd abandoned, worshippers returned to the stream water to soap themselves and climbed up the rocks to the falls, and the children on the bank resumed tending to their baskets.

Chantale came back. Max handed her a towel and a new set of clothes from the hamper.

"What's 'e-wah' mean?" Max asked as he watched her dry her hair.

"Iwa? Means devil's helper. People who work with bokors," she said. "Although I don't think that guy was one. He's probably just a local freak. Plenty of them around. Especially here. They come here normal, they get possessed, they never leave."

"What did he want with me?"

"Maybe he thought you were a loa—a god," she said, pulling on a sports bra.

"That would make a change," Max laughed, but as he replayed the incident he didn't find it so easy to dismiss. He was sure Dreadlocks had known either who he was or what he was doing there, whom he was looking for. It was in the way he'd first stared at him, deliberately, making sure he got his attention. Only then had he made his move. And what was in the box?

Chapter 36

CLARINETTE WAS A village on its way to becoming a small town. The bulk of it was situated on top of a hill overlooking the waterfalls, but the slopes of those hills were littered with a tumble of one-room houses, huts, and clapboard shacks so randomly ordered that, from a distance, they made Max think of a forgotten cargo of cardboard boxes spilled out of a long-gone truck.

People stopped to stare at them as they got out of the car. The adults scoped them out from head to toe, checked out the Land Cruiser, and went on about their business as though they'd seen it all before but were still interested in the upgrades. The children all ran away. They were especially scared of Max. Some went and got their parents, to point him out to them, others went and got their friends, who all came in cowering three-foot gangs and then ran off screaming as soon as he looked at them. Max wondered if their fear of him was only due to their never having seen his kind before, or if suspicion of the white man was something that had been passed down in the genes, mixed into the DNA.

Clarinette's tallest building was its imposing church—a mustard-yellow ring of reinforced concrete, topped with a thatched roof and a plain black cross. Four times the size of the next-biggest structure—a blue bungalow—it dwarfed the other amateurishly constructed clay and tin hovels clumped untidily around it. Max guessed from the way the church was positioned, right in the center of the village, that it had been built first, and then the community had evolved around it. The church didn't look much more than fifty years old.

The top of the cross scraped the clouds that hung incredibly low here, sealing the village in an impenetrable veneer of dusk, which the sun, although at its fullest, couldn't overcome. The gradual erosion of the nearby mountain ranges had brought the sky that little bit closer to the touch.