Dead Water Read Free Page A

to get smaller in his hands, like a rat pulling itself together before it bites. Her lifted lip showed sharp teeth, and gaps where the bearing of children had lost her some of them. “What I need a warning for, me?” she asked. “Ain't nobody can take me on and win, piano-player.”
    “They know it's you who was hired to cross Cosette Gardinier. If ill befalls her, they'll know whose door to come knocking on.”
    “And who's ‘they'?”
    “Those that have her good at heart.”
    The voodoo spit again, this time on the ground. “You dreamin', piano-player. There's none got that girl's good at heart.”
    “
I
have Cosette's good at heart,” replied January quietly. “And if she dies, you think anyone's going to listen when you say it was someone in the girl's own family behind it?”
    Queen Régine tried to pull her arm away; anger blazing in her hot little eyes. “The poison won't kill her. Her mama just want her sickly, to stay out of the way when Yves LaBranche come around courtin' the older girl. LaBranche been lookin' on that Cosette a little too close.”
    “That's what they tell you,” retorted January. “Cosette was like to die two nights ago. So maybe somebody else added a bit to what you gave the candy-lady on Rue Burgundy, thinkin' if the girl does die it'll be easy for you to take the blame.”
    The accusation of the old woman who sold pralines along the Rue Burgundy was a shot in the dark—January only knew Cosette was deeply fond of the pink-dyed coconut candles—but he saw the anger and alarm flare in the mambo's eyes. Then rage took their place, and she jerked on her hands again, her little wrists like sticks, lost in January's vast grip.
    “You lyin', piano-player,” she snarled. “You take your hand off me! No man lay a hand on Queen Régine!”
    “Let the girl alone. I'm warning you.”
    “
You
warning
me
?
I
warning
you,
piano-player!” And she pulled hard at his grip, so that when he opened his hands suddenly she staggered back, and fell over the low tomb with its chipped marble child. Furious, she sprang to her feet, no more now than a shadow in the darkness, a shadow from which one single skinny finger, clotted with graveyard dirt, stabbed out at him.
    “You keep your silence, and you stay out of this matter if you know what's good for you! You think 'cause your sister a voodoo you got a suit of armor, but you don't! I curse you! In the name of the Baron Cemetery, in the name of the Guédé, in the name of the Grand Zombi, I curse you, to the ruin of all you touch, and the destruction of all you hope!”
    In the blackness her eyes had a slick silver gleam, like a demon's eyes in shadow. Her voice turned shrill and nasal, like the voices of those ridden by the Guédé spirits in the voodoo ceremonies along Bayou St. John.
    “Guédé-vi, take the gold from out of his hands! Guédé-Five-Days-Unhappy, tear the roof away from over his head! Marinette-of-the-Dry-Arms, take his wife from him and let him walk the roads of the earth to search for her, and men hunting behind him and even the priests of God raising their hands against him!”
    She stepped back into the darkness, and her voice came to him, normal again. “You leave me alone, piano-player! You will curse your own hands that you raised against me!”
    He heard the slop and squeak of her feet, running away into darkness.
    Far off a cannon sounded, signaling curfew for all people of color, slave or free—except, of course, those whose professions made life more convenient for white men, like hack-drivers and musicians and waiters and the stevedores who unloaded cargoes on the levee, even at this slow season, far into the sweltering nights.
    The drums in the square had ceased. Like the voice of angels rebuking some pagan chant, churchbells floated out over the lamplit town, calling the faithful to evening Mass. January, who had gone to early Mass that morning, wiped the old woman's spit from his cheek with his bandanna and